CAPSLOCK is the applied AI lab Sam Portillo started to build systems inside real businesses and keep them running there. For now we are small.
who sam is
Sam is Salvadoran, and has lived and built in Berlin for about five years, with ventures in Switzerland and the US.
Sam's background is strategic design and business, not engineering. What the lab knows about AI comes from building with it inside working companies: a design studio, a Texas BBQ restaurant, a team that runs on its own reminders. We put systems into real operations, watch what changes for the people who use them, and write down what holds up and what doesn't. The fieldnotes are that record. Sam also works with a custom-software company that builds for enterprise and fintech, which keeps the lab close to how bigger systems get built and run.
why capslock exists
Plenty of businesses can't pay eighteen engineers. They also can't afford to fall behind. CAPSLOCK sits in between: a shared innovation and systems layer that several businesses can draw on, so each one gets the work of a lab without having to build one.
We start from design thinking and business, and come to the technology after. First the questions: who is this for, what would they do with it, what does better look like. Then we build inside the work, in the trenches, and keep what holds up. Practice is how that runs on an ordinary day.
why el salvador outwards
CAPSLOCK is built in El Salvador on purpose. Part of the job is developing local talent: people here learning to build with these tools on real projects. We work from here and outwards, with businesses wherever they are.
who is here today
Today CAPSLOCK is three people: Sam, one developer and one admin, lean by design. Around us is a regional and international network of collaborators close to what's happening right now: investors, CEOs and CTOs, infrastructure experts and agentic engineers. We call on them when the work needs it.
what we do
We work inside high-risk, high-complexity processes, where a mistake is expensive and nobody has time to stop and redesign, and make them leaner, auditable, easier to manage and more efficient. One process at a time. Sometimes the answer is a Claude skill, sometimes a whole app. Sometimes it's teaching someone how to prompt, or showing a team when to prompt and when to step back. Sometimes it's changing how a team thinks about the work. It all adds up.
Work shows the systems we've built and keep running, including 2fifty Texas BBQ's newsletter. The fieldnotes are thoughts, experiments and proofs from inside the lab, written while the work happens.
how to start
If you are working on something with AI, or want to, write to us. Tell us what you are building and where it is stuck, and we will take it from there.