About

Who made this

Mordechai Potash. 44. Beit Shemesh, Israel. Finance degree from UCT Cape Town (top 1% South African qualification). Decade in Torah study. Decade in optics. Three years becoming AI-native.

"I'm a deeply religious baal teshuva from Cape Town... spent almost a decade learning Torah then a decade in optics then the most intense 3 years becoming AI native. I have a great marriage, 3 beautiful kids, and absolutely no professional network experience."

The journey

The generative model brain

"I'm a First Principles Thinker with what I call a 'Generative Model Brain'— ideas explode like fireworks, patterns emerge from chaos, and I can absorb entire domains overnight."

"The pattern started simply: ideas arrive like sparks, then get analyzed through first principles until they're either actualized or discarded."

First principles thinking is fundamental. Most people do things by rote. My disability means I've never had the option to do things the normal way. Blessed with a natural first principles perspective.

How I learn

Pattern recognition—intuition almost always on the mark. Domain absorption—people often think I'm in their field of work. It takes me very quick to understand new domains.

"I love learning new domains and am very comfortable to drive into the unknown and first find my feet and then understand the landscape and then give it over."

5+ hours a day watching videos at 2-3x speed. 32K videos tracked. Built a pipeline to transcribe, embed, and retrieve—because watching at speed helps throughput but not recall. Now I can search "what did that tutorial say about X?"

I see myself as a domain translator. Hyperspecialized world, but I can bridge.

The paradox

"High IQ, poor executive function. I am a genius systematic thinker who lacks the finesse of social interactions."

Fast learner. Excellent researcher. Hyperfocus that can master domains overnight. But can't answer the phone. Can't follow up. Can't network.

"I am a better sniper than machine gunner. Everything I do is like a sniper with a rifle. That is how I think."

The optics decade

Self-taught ophthalmic lens manufacturing—both surfacing and coating. Built the fourth freeform lab in Israel from scratch. Raised $3M seed funding.

"Achieved expert technical knowledge of the machines, process, maintenance. Trained 5 technicians. Built a no-code app (AppSheet) to manage orders, status, redo. Used machine learning to reduce redo chances. Manufacturing at a tolerance of 3 nanometers."

Managed 5 optometrists and 2 optical shops. Designed ISO 7 cleanroom layout. International supply chain. Then COVID hit.

"Eighty percent of Israeli optical stores are in malls. When those closed, our sales channels disappeared overnight... suppliers came collecting on debts that I personally guaranteed. It was the darkest period as an entrepreneur."

The cognitive reality

Diagnosed with ADHD and autism. High IQ, poor executive function. Hyperfocus that makes everything else "dead to the world."

"My executive function is a real disability. I struggle to get any tasks done— calling people, answering the phone, getting back to people. My two main problems are social anxiety and executive function, and together they make my life very difficult."

"When I'm hyperfocused... everything else in the world is dead to me, and I'm 100% focused on whatever the object of my focus is."

Not "ADHD is a superpower." The reality: a sniper, not a machine gunner. Deadly accurate in focus, useless at spray-and-pray.

The social shutdown

Rejection sensitivity dysphoria. Social anxiety that triggers complete shutdown. Build alone rather than risk the shame of asking for help.

"I have tremendous social anxiety. I live 90% in the moment whether on my own or with others. In social situations I shut off to almost everything except the item of my focus."

"You'd rather die poor than feel the shame of admitting you need help. Build alone. Create frameworks in isolation. Talk to AI (no judgment, no shame). Resist outreach—every contact equals shame exposure."

RSD-induced avoidance. The anticipatory anxiety is so intense that it feels safer not to reach out at all than risk the emotional pain.

The AI transformation

Somewhere in 2024, something shifted.

"About a year and a half ago, I was finally able to completely complete a project within a single hyperfocus session. This was a game changer... because normally I'm so anxious about stopping and switching—am I gonna come back to it? That's when my productivity really started to skyrocket."

"When I speak to AI, I can communicate at the speed of thought. When I start having to translate everything down for other people, it becomes incredibly, incredibly hard."

The neurodivergent-AI fluency

"Neurodivergent speak fluent AI better than neurotypical."

Something about the way I think maps directly to how AI works. No social filtering. No need to translate. Direct communication at the speed of thought.

"Now that I have all my previous projects well documented, it is much less taxing. When I'm inside a hyperfocus session, it's much less of a risk for me to access my previous information—this is probably the biggest concept of everything."

AI as cognitive prosthetic. External memory that doesn't judge. Context preservation across sessions.

The hyperfocus blindness

"Look deeply into my hyperfocus blindness and how that is 2 sides of my life— my ability to hit incredible rapid new domain mastery and at the same time dead to the world and lack of real integrated continuity."

"Turn my 80% of my time that are super valuable hyperfocused moments—the value inside gets killed because as I enter a new hyperfocus the previous ones become dead."

The curse: brilliant depth in focus, complete blindness to everything else. The solution: external systems that preserve context when I can't.

The visual thinker

"As a visual thinker, this really helps me to be able to interact with your code in a more organic way."

Systems visualized. Patterns seen. Connections mapped. Not word-by-word—the whole picture at once.

The translation problem

"My biggest problem in the world is really translating the way I think into a way other people understand—and the other way around. The theory of mind in both directions."

This is the thread that connects everything. Every project is a translation layer. Every tool converts one way of understanding into another.

AI↔Human. Hyperfocus↔Output. Labels↔Dimensions. Consumption↔Knowledge.

What got built

"I built an external brain because context switching was destroying me— 359K messages queryable in 256ms."

"After many iterations of trying to place myself in different boxes, I am rather displaying the cognitive prosthetic I built."

That's poly. Not tools for neurodivergent people—the tools one neurodivergent person built for himself, now open source.

The family

Married 15+ years to Aviva. Three kids: Avraham (15), Sara (13), Shifra (12). We wanted more—Aviva had an emergency hysterectomy after Shifra. She almost died.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Family first—but needs to provide.

Core principles

• Ship at 80% or die at 0% — Perfectionism kills. Done beats perfect.
• Klal over Prat — Collective over individual. The whole matters more.
• Value exists whether recognized or not — Truth doesn't need validation.
• Creation > consumption — Generate, don't just consume.
• The bottleneck IS the amplifier — Constraint creates leverage.

The honest version

"I'm invisible to the world and I really really need money right now. We're struggling. I'm not working. My wife is working."

(Context: This was written during the struggle. Since then, built systems that generated $200K+ in 2024. Still invisible in terms of network and recognition—but the building continues.)

"I also am chronically unemployed. I feel bad about myself. I would love to offer some value for money. I struggle so much to reach out to people—what if there was another way?"

(Context: "Unemployed" meaning not employed by others—self-employed building infrastructure. 132 repos, 1,427 commits, 11 production systems. The work exists; the network doesn't.)

poly isn't a startup pitch. It's survival infrastructure that became real systems.

The 3-year arc

This is the year of harvest. No new fields. Reap what's planted.

The data

• 359K raw messages across 15K conversations (2023-2026)
• 106K embedded messages with semantic vectors
• 32K YouTube videos tracked, 15K transcribed
• 132 GitHub repos, 1,427 commits

Brain MCP for semantic search. GitHub for source code.

The invisible foundation

"Torah and halacha define who I am and my boundaries but don't focus on Torah ethics— it's always in the background but mostly invisible. I am an integrated Torah Jew."

Ultra-Orthodox. Baal teshuva. Almost a decade learning full-time in kollel. For a religious Jew, the highest level of connection to Hashem is learning Torah in depth. That training shaped how I think—systematic, first principles, deep.

"For many years I have been thoroughly consuming information and have now decided to generate. For years I have dreamed of disseminating knowledge from our rich and treasured past."

The domain translator

"I kind of see myself as being like a domain translator. We're in such a hyperspecialized world—everyone is getting nailed on the head because there's not one specialist in the world who is going to be better than an average AI model in a year's time."

"I love learning new domains and am very comfortable to drive into the unknown and first find my feet and then understand the landscape and then give it over."

People often think I'm in their field of work. The ability to rapidly absorb and translate domains—that's the core skill.

The core value

"What is my core value add? It's not coding—coding is a means to an end. My real value is simplifying complex domains and shaping solutions tailored for specific situations."

Unique systematic original thinker. Highly creative, practical, curious. I am intelligent and very intuitive. I have a systematic understanding of everything—I plug my whole life into systems.

"That's who I am—I see a problem, I build a solution."