Two MacBooks and an agent named Bud

What the report says

The Observer published a first-person technology piece by a Ugandan founder based in Toronto about building OptionBuddy, an artificial intelligence product for capital markets. The author describes working with co-founder Sam on “Bud,” an AI trading agent, from two MacBooks in Toronto while reflecting on the company’s Kampala roots and the difficulty of building far from home.

According to the account, the team had set an ambitious target of reaching $1 million in revenue by July 3, but did not achieve it. The author says the company is nevertheless revenue positive and credits the goal with accelerating product development. The first functioning version of Bud reportedly emerged about seven months into the build.

The article focuses heavily on the agent’s design. Sam is described as rejecting a simple chatbot approach in favor of a system with its own working environment, including memory, storage, a file system and the ability to run scripts. The goal is for Bud to pull together market information, prior user context, options activity, strategy signals and other relevant data before producing an answer a trader can use.

The piece also addresses a central concern around AI in finance: avoiding confident but unsupported answers when real money is involved. The reported approach is to make Bud’s steps traceable, including the data sources used, and eventually show those sources to traders. The founders say the product remains unfinished, with current work focused on improving the interface and using more charts instead of text-heavy responses.