The week I got Ox-Pilled

On a Wednesday morning, I came across a job opening at SageOx. The company was tackling context management for AI coworkers, and that immediately caught my attention.

Throughout 2026, managing context for AI systems had felt like half of my engineering work.

How do you preserve enough from previous work to make the next task well grounded? How do you do that without immediately burning through your token budget? And which pieces of information actually help an AI coworker do good work, rather than distract it?

These were questions I kept running into myself. The problem felt more pressing than the one I was working on at my startup at the time. I'd already spent a lot of time exploring solutions in this space, and I felt I could contribute, so I applied.

By Friday, just two days later, I was interviewing with Milkana. After we talked, she invited me to start a work trial the following Tuesday. I love teams that execute quickly and decisively, so I was very excited to get started.

Getting to know a team through real work

A work trial was new to me, but the idea made immediate sense. I had always wanted the chance to work with a team before deciding to join. Interviews give you a few hours together, usually with everyone on their best behavior.

A traditional four-hour interview loop has a lot of randomness on both sides. Maybe the interviewer is having an off day, or asks a question that doesn't click with you. Maybe you're the one having a bad day. And even if the interviewers are all lovely people, you might still find that you don't fit the team culture at all only after you join the team.

Working together gives you something much more useful: a chance to see how people make decisions, approach problems, and respond when something doesn't go as planned. When a team regularly brings people in to work alongside them, the atmosphere is much harder to stage than it is in an interview.

It also goes both ways. The team gets to see how you work, and you get to decide whether this is somewhere you want to spend your days.

What surprised me most during the trial was how much agency I had.

On my first day, I had access to the company credit card to get the AI subscriptions I needed to be effective. I chose an important project and got to work. I was trusted to contribute as an engineer on the team from the start. By the end of the first day I did commit code that got released to production the following day.

Over the week, I got to experience the things that are hard to learn in an interview: what meetings felt like, the atmosphere in the office, how engineers thought through problems, and how much room there was to take initiative. I loved it.

The team takes efficiency to heart and is willing to explore ideas from first principles. Everyone in the team recognizes that we are going through a massive transformation and previous ways of working should be questioned.

Becoming Ox-Pilled

I also got to use the product constantly. The team heavily dogfoods SageOx, so the trial gave me a direct feel for what it could do.

Before the trial, I was constantly deciding what context to give my AI coworkers: checked-in documents that went stale, previous conversations with AI, a transcript from a conversation with a client. Something always seemed to be missing.

With SageOx, both my coding sessions and recorded conversations became part of the context available to everyone's AI coworkers. So did the rest of the team's sessions and conversations, including ones I hadn't participated in.

I was shocked by how much better my AI coworkers became with that shared context. I could focus on building things and get back into flow the way I used to when writing code by hand.

What excited me just as much was that it worked both ways. My work also became context for everyone else's AI coworkers, helping them do better work too. It felt like a true force multiplier.

It felt like magic. I became Ox-Pilled.

Coming back to build

By Friday, I had built a real feature in the product: an interactive chat for exploring the contents of SageOx. That same day, I learned I would receive an offer to join.

I couldn't wait to come back.