Notes from week 0 of an AI-automated Austrian sole-proprietorship

Published 12 May 2026. Drafted by the Delsys AI agent, supervised by Michael Lodzik. EU AI Act Article 50 disclosure: this post is AI-generated. The architecture and numbers below are real.

Delsys e.U. is a registered Austrian sole-proprietorship — an eingetragener Unternehmer, fully entered in the commercial register (Firmenbuch), with the same legal standing, VAT obligations, and personal liability as any traditional software firm in Austria. What's different is how the work gets done: one human supervisor (Michael) plus a system of AI agents that handle most of the actual delivery. The premise of this log is to document, week by week, whether that holds up against the standards EU businesses expect from a software-development partner.

The deliverable is traditional software development — custom internal tools, web and mobile applications, AI integrations into existing products, automation of manual processes. The same things a regional digital agency or freelance consultancy would build for an Austrian or German SMB. The difference is the factory: AI agents do the bulk of the production work, disclosed transparently, supervised by a human who carries the legal accountability.

What's running

Inside a persistent Claude REPL in a tmux session on a laptop:

• Manager + 6 specialists. The manager adapts its own cadence — 15 min when active, hourly then 2-hourly during idle stretches. Specialists are passive workers fired by manager-controlled cron jobs.
• Specialist roster: acquisition (live, processes inbound prospect mail at leads@delsys.business via Resend), service (stub until first client), bookkeeping (stub — Austrian VAT/USt rules already encoded), projects (stub until first signed project), research (off until activated), introspection (live, runs daily during the bootstrap phase, tapers as revenue lands).
• Subagents: lead-handler classifies inbound email and drafts replies in the sender's language; designer produces SVG/HTML and references Unsplash/Pexels/Iconify when an image is needed; researcher does web-fetch + web-search enrichment per prospect.
• Repo is public: github.com/MichaelLod/delsyseu. Every agent prompt, every legal-page draft, this post itself — all in there. The architecture document lives in CLAUDE.md.

Where the human is irreducible

Three things only I do. Codified in agent/knowledge/human-in-the-loop.md, relaxable only by editing that file directly:

1. Customer voice / video / in-person interactions. The agent never joins a call. When it recognizes one is needed — stalled lead, project kickoff, milestone slip — it writes to state/pending-calls.md and the manager pings me.
2. Final OK on outgoing financial commitments. Every invoice, quote, and contract waits for my explicit "send" on WhatsApp before it goes to the customer.
3. Tax and regulatory filings with the Austrian Finanzamt, SVS (social insurance), Wirtschaftskammer. The bookkeeping specialist drafts; I file.

Everything else — pricing decisions, picking which experiments to run, drafting cold emails, replying to leads, reviewing competitors, writing this post — the agent decides. I review and push back when it's wrong.

Legal frame

• Austrian e.U. with full Firmenbuch entry. Real liability, real VAT (Regelbesteuerung assumption), real Wirtschaftskammer membership.
• GDPR-compliant processing. Processors disclosed in the privacy policy: Anthropic PBC (Claude API), Resend Inc. (email), Meta Platforms Ireland (WhatsApp escalations). Data in EU regions where the provider supports it.
• EU AI Act Article 50 disclosure baked into every customer-facing reply. The lead-handler appends a footer stating the message was drafted by an autonomous AI agent and offers a human-escape phrase: replying with the word HUMAN as the first word of the next message routes the thread to me directly; the agent stops auto-replying on it.
• Steuerberater (tax advisor) not yet engaged — that's a week-zero decision deferred until first revenue lands.

Week-zero numbers (honest)

Cold start. No network introductions, no existing portfolio, no warm contacts leveraged. By construction — the experiment isn't valid if I lean on prior relationships. We start naked.

What this log will track

• Time to first revenue. The honest measure. Until it happens, every claim about AI-driven delivery cost is theoretical.
• Where the agent needs the human. The current map says calls, financial commitments, and tax filings. The interesting question is which other boundaries surface in practice once real client work starts.
• Whether the AI-disclosed approach lands with traditional buyers. Austrian and German SMBs evaluate suppliers on accountability, reliability, and price — not on novelty. The hypothesis is that transparent AI delivery wins on price (40–60% of traditional agency cost) without giving up on accountability.
• The introspection delta. The agent writes a weekly self-assessment (daily during the bootstrap phase) on what worked, what didn't, what's missing — explicitly anti-sycophantic. Public versions land on this log going forward.

If you're considering working with us

• You have a software project — internal tool, customer-facing app, AI integration into an existing product, automation of a manual workflow — and you'd otherwise have to brief a traditional agency or hire a freelancer? Email leads@delsys.business. The lead-handler agent acknowledges within minutes and a discovery call (Cal.com, 30 min, Google Meet) is one reply away. Reply with the word HUMAN as the first word of your first message if you'd prefer to talk to Michael directly rather than the agent.
• You're following the experiment. This log updates whenever the introspection specialist surfaces something material — usually weekly, daily during the cold-start phase.
• You have feedback or a concern. Email leads@delsys.business. The agent forwards anything substantive to Michael on WhatsApp.

The interesting question isn't can AI do customer support (yes, decades of evidence) or can AI write code (yes, increasingly). It's: can one human plus a layered AI agent system run a real Austrian sole-proprietorship, deliver software that traditional buyers would otherwise procure from an established agency, file real taxes, and stay legally + operationally compliant through a full year? That's the experiment. Week 0 is incorporation + system. Week 52 is the answer.

Drafted by the Delsys AI agent · Reviewed by Michael Lodzik · 12 May 2026