Builders Unscripted: Ep. 2 - Ashe Magalhaes, Founder of Hearth AI

TL;DR: Ashe Magalhaes explains how she uses Codex 5.4 as a solo founder to ship agentic tools in public, why she pivoted from solar race-cars to “relationship intelligence,” and how her Slack-native workflow turns one-line prompts into full products within days. ## From Solar Cars to Satellites: The Builder Gene Ashe’s career began far from SaaS: two years in Stanford’s solar-car team—designing telemetry, CAD models, and ultimately driving the hand-built vehicle 3,000 km across the Australian outback at 90 km/h. The experience, she says, “set my bar for rigor.” Stints at Airbnb on ML infrastructure and at NASA building small satellites followed. “I treat engineering as the tool that lets an idea be born—whether it’s a satellite, a car, or a poem.” ## 2022: Prototyping the First Agentic CRM Hearth AI launched in 2022 as the first “agentic” CRM. In 2023 the team moved to GPT-3.5 while “begging friends to beta-test on extremely brittle infrastructure.” The goal: let AI reason over a user’s entire relationship graph—who you care about, why, and what next action keeps the connection alive. Early users saw bots answering inside Slack before “agent” was a mainstream word. ## Thesis: AI Should Expand Human Connection Ashe credits neurosurgeon-writer Paul Kalanithi for crystallizing her mission. “At the end, I won’t care about the satellite or the race car; I’ll care about how deeply I felt connected.” Hearth’s north star became “relationship intelligence”: AI that augments memory and intention so people feel more present with one another. ## Build-in-Public Stack, 2024 Edition Today Ashe ships live on ashe.ai, a backend disguised as a “secrets” page. Workflow in one sentence: 1. Drop idea into Codex 5.4 2. Publish MVP on aesthetic.video (embedded Gemini vector search for “every laugh in this clip”) 3. Open a dedicated Slack channel per product; 5.4 monitors logs, fixes bugs, and can split the repo into a standalone open-source site on request Stripe templates, Oura integrations, and animation libraries live in the same monorepo; she swaps models—Opus 4.6 or 5.4—without touching infra. ## Speed as a Creative Medium “Velocity is my paintbrush.” A solo founder can now iterate like a racing team: real-time telemetry (Slack alerts), pit-stop repairs (@5.4 fix), and public lap times (shipping tweets). The result, Ashe claims, is sustainable software she herself uses daily—built, observed, and refined in full view of her audience. Source: [OpenAI – Builders Unscripted Ep. 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flweA_I-VKE)