Who builds Saybooks
Last updated 7 October 2026.
Saybooks is built by one person: Peter Varga, an engineer in Portland, Oregon. Thirty years of making enterprise software actually work, for Nike, Apple and Delta among others, and an MSc in electrical engineering before that. The consulting practice is Portland AI Works, where the other things I have built are listed alongside this one.
Why this exists
Large companies spent thirty years putting rules into their systems so that the system, not the person in a hurry, decides what is allowed. Small businesses got spreadsheets. Now they are being handed AI agents that are willing, fast and perfectly capable of writing down a purchase order number nobody gave them.
Saybooks is the other half of that: a set of books with the rules inside them. The agent can do a great deal, and the parts it must not do are refused by the system rather than by a prompt asking it nicely. A refusal names the business reason and is written down next to the actions that succeeded.
What is unusual about how it is built
One registry defines every command once. From that single definition come the agent's MCP tools, the screens in the web workbench, the permission checks and the audit rows. A click in the browser and a sentence to Claude are the same event, logged the same way, refused the same way. There is no second code path where the rules are looser.
The rules themselves are public and executable. Each area has a written specification, a list of acts, a list of invariants, and scenarios that run against the real system on every build. You can read all of it at saybooks.io/specs, including the last conformance run and what it proved.
What it will not do
| Send anything | It never emails a customer, never charges a card, never ships. It records what happened. |
| Invent a fact | No purchase order, check number, tracking number or date is ever guessed. Empty beats plausible. |
| Rewrite history | An issued invoice is immutable. Corrections are credit notes, and the original stays where it was. |
| Hide a refusal | Blocked actions go into the same log as the ones that went through, with the reason attached. |
Where it is honest about being early
Saybooks is young and I would rather say so here than have you find out in your own books. It is not accounting software: it keeps the operational record upstream of the ledger and hands the journal to QuickBooks Online or Xero. There is no payroll, no inventory valuation, no tax filing. saybooks.io runs on a server I rent in the European Union, and the whole thing is public under the AGPL, so if I disappear you export everything as JSON and run it yourself.
Elsewhere
- portlandaiworks.com: my consulting practice, and the other systems I have built.
- github.com/alviso/saybooks: the source, the specs and the commit history.
- hello@saybooks.io reaches me directly.