The best products in the world are invisible. When we use them, we don't notice the product, we focus on what it enables.

There are many such products we take for granted in our lives—a good chair, a touch screen, a drinking glass. It took generations to perfect these products, but at some point, the tool receded and we were able to focus on the tasks at hand: winding down after a busy day, scrolling through a friend's birthday pictures, or enjoying a relaxing glass of wine.

As the creators of Capy, we believe there remains a tremendous amount of complexity and friction in software systems. Specifically in the age of AI, we've seen the following story play out over and over again:

You give your AI a prompt that should work in one shot. It runs into a compounding series of roadblocks, and you end up spending more time and energy conversing towards a solution than you would just performing the task yourself.

This is, most fundamentally, a design problem. Products that are complex and require too many human decisions to operate aren't only bad for humans, they're even worse for AIs. Every decision a human needs to make in order to operate a product is a potential mistake that a non-deterministic AI will make.

One of the areas with the highest concentration of such roadblocks is in trust systems, particularly secrets management.

We want to solve this.

We believe the solution requires meticulous craft in software engineering and product development. While everyone is vibe-coding "production" apps in hours and spinning up parallel sub-agents to create code that nobody understands, we've decided to slow things down and engineer our products intentionally. What we're doing requires a disciplined commitment to purpose, and an obsession with simplification until everything unnecessary has been removed.

While we may use AI to produce our products, we focus on quality and depth instead of breadth. The resulting code is clear about what it does, honest about its constraints, and narrow in its scope. It should be able to be read, traced, and trusted — not just by the LLM or engineer who wrote it, but by anyone and anything that comes after. As Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” We take this philosophy as a foundational truth and apply it to our software.

Our modus operandi is to “simplify to the point of invisibility”. The first problem we've decided to simplify in this fashion is secrets management. Capy is the product. We hope you enjoy using it so much that you don't notice it exists.

- Vincent Chan, Founder & Designer, Incentv Inc.