Michael Ruescher

I'm building Bitter and running SheetGenius, Inc. , the company behind it and a few dozen small software products.

In May 2026, after twelve years helping build one software company, I left to do this work full time.

After a lot of building with AI agents, my read is simple: the demo comes together quickly now. The real work is everything around it.

The model needs a repo, credentials, logs, deploys, memory, and permissions. Bitter puts those pieces in one place.

The name comes from Richard Sutton's “Bitter Lesson.” General methods that scale with compute keep winning. My bet is that as the models get stronger, what matters more is everything around them: a real place to work, and a person responsible for the result.

We use Bitter to build software of our own. BitterClip is the clearest example so far: it turns long recordings into clips that stay linked to the exact moment in the recording.

If you're working through the same problem, I'd like to compare notes.