JC
Julissa Cotillo
engineer + founder// software & AI

I'm Julissa. I build AI for hyper-local, personalized businesses.

Engineer turned founder, running two companies on the systems I build. RAG, agents, and the quiet automation that makes a small business feel bigger than it is.

building in public, from Tampa

Build logs

Notes from the journey. Wins, fails, and the boring middle.

build log

Five Months In: Why I Left a Six‑Figure AI Career to Build My Own Systems

Five months ago, I walked away from a six‑figure AI career I’d spent more than a decade building. Not because I hated it, I actually loved most of it. The teams, the offsites, the late‑night debugging sessions that turned into breakthroughs. But after ten years of great jobs, I realized I wasn’t chasing a dream role anymore. I was chasing control. The irony? I’d spent years teaching machines to optimize for efficiency while my own life ran on autopilot. That tension, between building intelligen

Jun 9, 2026
Moving off ___

How I migrated 3 open-source apps off a flaky VPS in one afternoon — and saved ~$80/mo doing it

How I migrated 3 open source apps off a flaky VPS in one afternoon and saved ~$80/mo doing it For months I’d been running three open source apps on a single Coolify VPS: Ghost for my blog, Rocket.Chat for agent notifications, and a Mastra based web scraper that occasionally went feral. It wasn’t catastrophic, just unreliable enough that Google Search Console started flagging 5xx crawl errors and UptimeRobot pinged me awake every few days. I even built a Cloudflare Worker watchdog that redeploy

May 22, 2026
Building in public

AI Consultant for Small Business: Real Value, Not Just Hype

What an AI Consultant Actually Does for Your Small Business (and What's a Waste of Money) In today's fast-paced digital world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't just for tech giants anymore. Claude Small businesses are increasingly leveraging AI to streamline operations, delight customers, and unlock new growth opportunities. But navigating the AI landscape can feel like a maze! That's where a skilled AI consultant comes in. They cut through the hype to deliver practical, impactful solutions t

May 21, 2026

Building something hyper-local?

Working on a personal or local business where AI could help? I'd love to hear about it. I read everything.