OP8. Operator Dossier
Operator Dossier · Applied AI / Autonomous Systems Vol. I · No. 8

Oday Brahem.

Applied-AI Builder
Writes nextbig.dev
nextbig.dev ↗
Top story Fable 5 is back at full capacity, and Anthropic’s answer to a brutal week is a model you can actually call // The Tape WATCH GOOGL · WATCH Etched · LONG Anthropic // The Call Within four months, guaranteed capacity becomes a product you can buy rather than a hope // The Call Within six months, a Chinese open-weights model holds the top spot on a major leaderboard // The Desk Falsifiable analysis, settled in public. Not investment advice. //

The lead

I’m an AI builder shipping production systems end to end, solo. Three are live right now. When a project needs tooling that doesn’t exist, I build the harness myself.

3
Products live now
~6,000
Commits in the past year
300+
Sources read daily
OB·01
Oday Brahem
№ 01

Why AI

A2 · Curiosity

I’ve read obsessively since I was a kid. My mom kept me supplied with science magazines and I read them cover to cover. That curiosity never left: I still want to know everything about anything new, and progress is the part I find most exciting.

AI is the biggest shift I’ve seen since the internet, so going deep came naturally. Lately the focus is AI infrastructure: what a token costs to serve, who pays for the buildout, and where both are heading. The wire at the top of this page is that habit, published daily on nextbig.dev.

№ 02

The arc

A3 · Track Record

At each company I joined, I ended up building the function that wasn’t there yet.

2017
Business development at VersaFile, an IBM RPA partner at the time. Got my foot into enterprise software.
2018
Collabware. Within six months I’d researched the US Navy and Marine Corps’ records system and walked us into the Pentagon with the SharePoint-based proposal the company shipped.
2019
Moved into engineering. Lead QA engineer for 2.5 years across cloud and on-prem, building test automation to 85% coverage.
2021
Ran the on-prem-to-cloud customer-success program and cut churn to 4%, then moved into sales engineering and built the demo environments.Alongside it, served as an intelligence operator in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves: OSINT and geospatial, through 2023.
2025
Back at VersaFile, by then an SAP middleware product company. Migrated a customer base onto SAP S/4HANA and grew revenue on migrated accounts 5×.
2026
All in on AI, solo: ~6,000 commits in a year across vote.direct, nextbig.dev, and an autonomy project I taught myself from scratch, which cleared Anduril’s AI Grand Prix qualifier.
№ 03

The work

A4 · Shipped & Live
nextbig.dev Plate I · Daily AI Read Flagship · Live
nextbig.dev Falsifiable, daily

A daily AI-infrastructure briefing. An LLM pipeline over 300+ sources, an agent-callable MCP server, a daily podcast in a synthetic version of my voice, and a daily prediction that gets settled in public.

Open nextbig.dev ↗
vote.direct Plate II · Online Voting Shipped · Live
vote.direct HOAs & communities

Online voting for HOAs and communities. I built a platform-specific harness, support agents that turn tickets into bug reports before I see them, and a published, state-by-state corpus of HOA voting law.

Visit the live product ↗
OP8 Plate III · Autonomy R&D Qualifier cleared
OP8 Vision-only flight

Autonomous drone flight, trained vision-only on rented cloud compute. Robotic arms on the bench for testing, and a hardware build in progress. It cleared Anduril’s AI Grand Prix qualifier a couple of months after I started from scratch.

Open the site ↗