Keeping up with AI is a full-time job. We share ours, free.
AI Open Sauce is Hourglass AI sharing everything we find while doing it for clients: playbooks, Claude skills, build logs and code. Free, no sign-up.
By Michael Batko and Finlay Ekins · Updated 6 October 2026
Do it yourself
FreeEverything we use, no sign-up
- Step-by-step playbooks we run with clients
- The Claude skills that run Hourglass AI
- Build logs with before and after numbers
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New playbooks, skills and build logs, every second Tuesday. Unsubscribe in one click.
Have us build it
We build it with your team
- For Australian companies of 10 to 100 people
- 30 minutes with Michael or Finlay, our co-founders
- You leave knowing where AI pays back first
Start with what's slowing you down
Free to copy, no sign-up.
Rather have it running in your business?
Why keeping up with AI is hard for a 10 to 100 person company
The tools outrun the plan
Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini change every few weeks. Between the first and second run of our own AI course, five months apart, the models got markedly better at long documents and output quality. A plan written in January is stale by June.
Keeping up is nobody's job
In a company of 30, AI is everyone's side project and nobody's real one. Owners tell us they will move faster on their own. When we check back two or three months later, most have not started.
Free advice is a sales funnel
Search for a free AI playbook for an Australian small business and you get vendor PDFs behind an email form, written to sell a platform. Nobody shows you the prompts, the files or the numbers.
So we publish what we learn doing it for clients, as we learn it. That is AI Open Sauce.
Trusted where the business is what people know.
What changed for them
Property · MelbourneWhole office using AI in 7 weeks, up from 5 people
Property developer with a $1bn pipeline
Venture capital · Sydney100% of the team using AI every week
$1bn+ deep-tech venture fund
Recruitment · Sydney5 to 10 hours back every week
CFO recruiter, 30,000+ finance networkThe Sauce
What we built, what broke and what it means for your business, with the real numbers. Every second Tuesday, free.
New playbooks, skills and build logs, every second Tuesday. Unsubscribe in one click.
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You talk to a founder, not a sales repAI Open Sauce: questions people ask
What is AI Open Sauce?
AI Open Sauce is Hourglass AI sharing everything it finds while making Australian companies AI-native: the playbooks we run with clients, the Claude skills that run our own company, build logs with before and after numbers, and our public code. It is free with no sign-up, written for companies of 10 to 100 people that cannot carry a full-time AI team.
Is AI Open Sauce free?
Yes. Every playbook, skill and build log on AI Open Sauce is free to read, copy and adapt, with no sign-up or email gate. The hgstack repo is MIT-licensed on GitHub; check each repo's own licence before reusing its code.
Who writes AI Open Sauce?
AI Open Sauce is written by Hourglass AI co-founders Michael Batko and Finlay Ekins and the Hourglass team, from AI builds for Australian companies. Every piece carries a named author and the date it was last updated.
Do the AI Open Sauce Claude skills work in ChatGPT or Gemini?
The skills are written for Claude Code and Claude.ai, which load a SKILL.md file and run it with tools. The instructions inside a skill still work as a plain prompt in ChatGPT or Gemini, but the automatic loading and tool access do not carry over.
How is AI Open Sauce different from hiring an AI consultant?
AI Open Sauce gives you the method; a consultant, including Hourglass AI, gives you the hours and the accountability. A team of 10 to 100 people can run a playbook itself if one person owns it for a few hours a week. If nobody can, the Hourglass AI audit maps what to build first, audit to roadmap in 14 days.
How often is new AI Open Sauce material published?
AI Open Sauce grows as material is ready rather than on a fixed schedule. Every new playbook, skill or build log goes to Open Sauce email readers first, and the newest three always sit at the top of this page.