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Genesis — the process, in the open

Why this document. The making-of is part of the work. This project wasn't born from a founder's lone intuition: it was stirred, grilled and contradicted by a series of AI tools — a YC-style office-hours, a situationist counter-fire, a panel of adversarial personas. Rather than hide that behind the usual story, we expose it. Same gesture as the label: show the forgery, name the misunderstanding. Transparency as a détournement of the spectacle of creation.

The starting point​

An empty repo. One spreadsheet: ~600 music genres as rows, the same as columns, ~360,000 empty cells. Nothing else. No product, no plan.

Phase 1 — office-hours​

A YC-style diagnostic, run in "questions that sting" mode. What it surfaced, with no comfort:

  • Demand: "for myself." n=1, zero external evidence.
  • The trap, named: "solution in search of a problem" — wanting to industrialize a gesture never performed even once by hand.
  • The reversal: scarcity isn't volume. Suno generates it endlessly. What's rare is curation — throw away 95%, keep the ear. 360,000 isn't a treasure, it's a haystack.
  • The fork that structures everything else: the factory (a pipeline that runs without you) vs the instrument (a thing you play).

Phase 2 — the situationist counter-fire (Debord)​

Debord's counter-voice détourned the startup framing itself:

  • The factory is the spectacle. Automation is the murder of the dérive.
  • The forcing question: "is this the construction of a lived situation, or one more accumulation of spectacle?"
  • Verdict: value lives in the lived gesture (the instrument), not in throughput (the factory).

Phase 3 — the adversarial challenge (personas)​

A panel of hostile personas (finance, engineering, leadership, legal) attacked the plan:

  • 🔴 Legal foundation first. Selling AI-generated music to rights-sensitive buyers is conditional.
  • 🔴 Identity contradiction. Situationist prank / engineering demo / B2B SaaS / open-source movement: four projects, four customers. Choose.
  • 🟠 Untested demand. The first signal must come from someone who can say no.
  • 🟠 Over-scoping. Building the full factory when the real deliverable doesn't need it.

The decisions that came out of it​

  • The instrument over the factory. The human isn't in the loop — the human is the product.
  • Resolutely free — AGPLv3. A commons, not a closed product.
  • French law as the angle. A producer's neighboring right on the master + human contribution.
  • The name: Le Malentendu.

Why in the open​

The usual startup story erases doubt, contradiction, the help received, to sell the image of an inevitable vision. That's exactly the spectacle this project targets. So we keep the traces: the wrong early answers, the questions that hurt, the voices that pushed back.

Showing that is the work as much as the engine.