Software for Thought

SheetGenius began with a worksheet. Michael Ruescher was traveling with his family and homeschooling his kids when GPT‑3.5 came out. The model could help write a lesson, but it could not reliably turn one into the next day’s worksheet and a printable PDF. SheetGenius closed that gap.

Each new model took over more of the job on its own. By 2026 a capable frontier agent could make a decent worksheet and PDF directly, and Michael had moved most of his effort elsewhere. The app still has its uses. Its core trick was no longer something only the app could do.

The name is left over from that first product. The company now owns, operates, bills for, and supports everything in the portfolio.

Richard Sutton’s essay “The Bitter Lesson” later gave Michael a name for what he had watched happen. That experience changed where he put the work. Bitter is what he works on now: a prepared place where the agent a customer already uses can build and run real software, with the source, deployments, and history kept in order.

Michael left his job in May 2026 to work on Bitter full time, and hit a second problem within weeks. Building software someone can use turns out to be a different job from getting anyone to know it exists. He had been treating distribution as the thing that happens after the work.

So he made a video. Making one video taught him how much sits between a recording and something a person would actually watch, and how little of that is the recording. BitterClip started there, as a tool for a problem he had that week. Of the small products the company put into the world this year, it is the one that pulled, so it is where the work goes now.