Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit's site

alexrodba.com · English

CEO and co-founder of MarsBased, angel investor, and writer from Barcelona. Essays on AI development, startups, bootstrapping and remote work. And metal.

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Last post: Oct 30, 2026
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Site title: Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit — CEO of MarsBased, AI development & metal
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A personal token of gratitude
Oct 30, 2026 · original
The last week of October is a very special one for me, as the CEO of MarsBased. It doesn't have any particular deadline, project start/end or conference. There's nothing that can't be pushed back or pulled forward for a week, so it's a self-imposed thing, entirely. This week is where we prepare the end-of-the-year gifts for the team. As it's customary in our region, we buy lots de nadal - a box full of local food and drinks, and send each employee one of them. Some years it's 100% local product from Catalunya, other years we've done a product of each region where we have an employee in. However, at 30 people, the latter is becoming too complicated. This is an unwritten law at MarsBased. You don't have it as a benefit on our handbook. We just give it because we can and because we think you deserve it. It's a nice touch. But that's only one part of the gift. The second one is a hand-writte
The rise of Meat Proxies (and how to disarm them)
Oct 9, 2026 · original
I've noticed a trend that's on the rise, lately, especially around contract negotiations of all sorts (NDAs, SLAs, DPAs, etc.), whereby one or both (human) parties just sends the output of his/their respective AI tools to the other one, and viceversa. In doing so, their contribution to the discussion is null or even negative. Instead of removing friction, they're adding unnecessary steps, clauses and verbosity that make the discussion drag along for much more than it's necessary. The people in the middle are meat proxies , as seemingly coined by Niklas Gruhn in this article , and this term couldn't be more graphical and explicit. Put simply: Clearly I've used AI for this because I wouldn't have spelled my name without the graphic accent on the A I've had enough interactions with meat proxies lately that I'm forced to write this post about how to spot them and how to steer them in the rig
First business trip in two years
Sep 26, 2026 · original
I just came back from New York, where I've visited one of MarsBased's biggest clients. It has been my first business trip in two years. Not every company can afford a CEO who doesn't travel for business for two years, especially when the CEO drives +90% of the sales, like in our case. Luckily, MarsBased can. Some background: for much of my adult life, I have travelled a lot. Conferences, events, client meetings, nomadic lifestyle, you name it. I didn't have anyone waiting for me back home, so I took advantage of it. In recent years, this has change, so I have slowed down, because family comes first, and when my baby was born last year, I took almost three months off. Trips per year, according to my Nomadlist profile All in all, this trip made me realise a thing or two: The business didn't care: For the last two years, the company has kept growing at the same pace, regardless of whether I
Basic Instinct
Sep 18, 2026 · original
I've been playing with Instinct lately, an AI agent that can actually operate websites and do things for you, running on whatsapp and I've had a couple of "holy shit" moments already. Not in the "this changes everything" way, though. I have had enough of those claims for a lifetime, especially when the product in question is hyped up by VCs from Silicon Valley. But I refer to the very practical scenario where I keep finding stupid tasks I have postponed for months, sometimes years, and now I can just throw them at something else while I continue working. This is fundamentally different from how I use Claude or ChatGPT. I use those to think, debate, research, write code, review documents and generally augment whatever I am doing - but mostly for work-related stuff, so they're well sandboxed. Instinct, on the other hand, gets the stuff I do not want to do myself, with no access to my work
The golden era of AI-pilled founder entitlement
Sep 4, 2026 · original
Having spent the last month reading twitter, hacker news and other sites while being on holidays has left me raising eyebrows more often than not. Everyone seems to be doing the right thing and think they're unstoppable. They're preaching left and right about them being on the right path to stardom. But, are they? Scroll far enough through founder Twitter right now and you will find screenshots of solo founder's "team" page with five AI agents instead of actual humans. Another few posts, and you run into someone claiming to have made it to 20k MRR in a couple of weeks with a few agents only. Further down, one person in Bali runs outbound sales for other companies using agents and she - allegedly - makes dozens of thousands of bucks a month. Another person handles millions of support tickets for companies with an army of agents. Another one is close to becoming the first - legit - one-man
I'm taking August off. Tell me what to write in September.
Jul 31, 2026 · original
This is the last thing you'll hear from me until September. I am taking a break for a month to recharge batteries, and you should too. I don't stop because I've run out of things to say. In fact, I am having more ideas than ever, but I realised that the original intention of this site was to share tips from Founder to Founder , but I've drifted away from that enough to warrant a change of direction. I've been publishing on instinct: whatever was in my head that week was the thing I'd write about. Whatever I'd argued about at dinner or whatever crossed my mind while walking down Barcelona. I like giving these ideas some thought, transforming them and publishing them for the world to see. The articles have been read by thousands of people by now, a couple of them going semi-viral. One ( F2F #45: Calm entrepreneurship ) ended up in a PhD thesis: That works fine for a hobby but I didn't give
Ship it or don't build it
Jul 24, 2026 · original
The old adage says that developers don't build the same app twice. If you're asked to build a very similar app to one you built in the past, it's better to build it from scratch because you're a better developer now. You've learnt more better practices, your code is cleaner, your architecture is sounder and you know the straightest path because you get to avoid the many iterations and learnings you endured in the first project. That is how learning works: through repetition and by improving little by little, becoming more efficient every pass and avoiding painful mistakes from previous iterations. One could argue that this is what's happening now that we know that the cost of creating code is virtually zero: it's better to code from scratch. If you built a solution two weeks ago for a particular problem, unless you have exactly the same problem, you will most likely develop something fro
Keeping Claude tidy
Jul 17, 2026 · original
I've started doing some quality of life tweaks to Claude Code that help me visually to keep things tidy across projects and tasks. If you're the kind of person who's got 19458 unread emails in your inbox and can sleep at night, this is not for you . If, on the other hand, you have to keep things tidy to avoid freaking out every morning, this might help. I started grouping my sessions in Claude Code (I use the desktop version) by project. I try to keep 1-2 open tasks at the same time per project. When I'm done, I archive them if I want to keep that context, or I delete them if they're not useful, they broke or I ended up cancelling what I was doing. You can skip this part, but I like the feeling of taking the trash out every now and then. Once tasks are complete, they are moved back to "ungrouped". I, additionally, add ✅ if there's nothing else I can do in that task (for archived tasks),
Thank you, AI slop
Jul 10, 2026 · original
I don't know if you also have experienced this: my eyes and brain are immediately detecting AI slop and rejecting it altogether. Maybe it's intuition, maybe it's visual pattern recognition, but the moment I see slop, I flag it instantly and something deep inside of me does not want to see it. We have been reading AI-generated content for ages, a lot of it before we even labelled it as AI-generated (for instance, Google Translate output), so our brains have adopted this new flavour of content through different model variations, and even adapted to it. Two years ago, we made fun at images with people with funny fingers or the nightmare-inducing videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti, but nowadays we're nearing the frontier from which we can't tell real from fake. Most of it, it's still obvious, while a smaller fraction of the AI-generated content it's only visibly fake to the trained eye. B
My AI stack
Jul 3, 2026 · original
I've spent the last couple of years integrating AI into how I work at MarsBased, and even though things change rapidly, I feel like my AI stack is pretty consolidated... for now. I have the feeling that somewhere around the corner lurks The Next Big Thing™, which is going to change my AI stack drastically. Maybe it's Fable, maybe it's not (we'll know when they stop playing hide and seek with it). Up until December 2025 everything revolved around ChatGPT for me, whereas now, ChatGPT has residual use in my day to day. The core philosophy: augmentation, not automation nor replacement When we started repositioning MarsBased around "AI-Augmented Development," it wasn't marketing smoke. It was me finally articulating something I'd been living with for a while: I don't want AI to replace us, I want AI to augment us. To give us superpowers. Take the tedious tasks so that I can focus on stuff tha
Connected to WiFi but the login page won't show up? Here's why, finally
Jun 26, 2026 · original
First off, apologies for not sending the issue last week. I figured that not sending a newsletter on the day before my wedding would be socially acceptable, so I used that time for more pressing concerns. That being said, I'm itching to share more things and there's this one issue that bugs me too often, when working remotely. You join the airport wifi, menu bar icon of the wifi bars fills up, it says "connected", and then nothing loads and no login page appears. And it can be a few different things until you hit the nail on the head, so let me summarise it for you. Maybe, and only maybe, by writing it down I will be able to memorise it, finally. Just maybe. Public networks use a captive portal , the page that makes you accept terms or sign in first - usually a popup or a landing page on the browser. When you join, your device quietly pings a known test address (captive.apple.com, connec
The case for underengineering
Jun 13, 2026 · original
A few weeks ago I sat down with Alberto Betella, the owner of RSS.com for the MarsBased podcast. At some point, we were discussing architectural decisions, and how barebones the first versions of his software were, barely a few lines of php. No fancy containers, no load balancers, no bloated frontends, no nothing. RSS.com is fully bootstrapped, so every line of unnecessary code costs real money, meanwhile, their VC-backed competitors were shipping features nobody asked for, running teams twice the size, and somehow moving slower. When I posted the episode on LinkedIn, I came up with the word " underengineering " (which, apparently, is barely used in certain circles so I can't claim it) and it got a few eyebrows raised and positive reactions overall, so I've been reflecting on it ever since. Underengineering is not a lack of craft. It is a deliberate decision to build only what the proble
My Claude setup
Jun 5, 2026 · original
I've been using Claude since January, and I've got acquainted with it to a level that's clearly past most regular users. However, I am not a hardcore coder and I don't have an army of subagents running on thousands of scripts/skills/libraries. With that in mind, you might find my setup interesting. Ditching ChatGPT first It took a while, but I switched over to Claude overnight, cold turkey. No archiving, no salvaging things I could reuse, no nothing. I seem to recall that I didn't port the custom instructions either and when I tried to export the memories, ChatGPT did a poor job, so I decided to start from scratch. Do I regret this decision? No. Absolutely not. In fact, and we will see why later, I am happy that I didn't shut down my ChatGPT account yet. What I actually use it for The short answer is: almost everything that used to happen in a mix of Google Docs, Apple notes, email threa
Eleven years investing in startups: what I got wrong, what I got lucky with, and what I'd tell myself in 2015
May 29, 2026 · original
There is a check I wrote in 2015 that I still think about: One thousand euros, my entire liquid savings at the time. I was one year into creating MarsBased and my salary wasn't anything to write home about, but a good friend told me about investing in startups with small amounts of money just to get started, and dispelled a few doubts I had. Investing in startups is like getting a tattoo or trying drugs: it's always through a friend that tells you that it's safer than you think, more accessible than it looks like and shows you that it's also pretty affordable (at the beginning, at least). He had been given great returns in a couple of investments - he was one of the first investors in Kantox - so I wired them into the new Kantox round, at a much higher valuation than he had joined a few years back. I had no thesis, no portfolio theory, no due diligence process, no financial background an
The demo limbo
May 15, 2026 · original
I have been building a tonne of things since Claude Code entered my life this past January. The pattern is clear: I build things, they live in demo limbo, habit never forms, and the friction of recovery kills re-engagement, so I stop using them - or, at least, I don't use them as intended (ie: every day or week). Off the top of my head, I have built a few projects I needed to get off my chest: A personal finance tracker. A personal dashboard to see progress in all my projects. My band's website. A website about Microplastics in Catalan. A page-to-page comparison tool for migration projects (needed it for work). A custom Ghost theme for the next iteration of this site. A memory system + reminders app (sort of an assistant). Are these tools actually solving a daily need, or are they satisfying a builder itch? I don't know. I feel better about having created them than when I didn't have the

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