The IT Guy Was There First

Most people who know me now only know one version of me.

Coach. Gym owner. The guy yelling numbers at you during a WOD. Meat head, basically. I will say that one myself. I spent years building that reputation on purpose.

Then they find out I build AI agents. Actual software. Python, APIs, systems running in the background of my house and my businesses.

That does not add up from the outside. A coach who codes reads like a plot twist, like I picked up a strange hobby somewhere between snatch cycles.

Here is what they are missing. Before the fitness, before the gyms, before CrossFit entered my life, I was the IT guy. I studied Information Technology at the University of San Carlos. Fixing computers, setting up networks, tech support for myself and everyone in my friend group. That came first.

Fitness came later and took over the stage. The tech never left. It stopped being the thing people saw.

The quiet proof: I have never paid an IT expense in any business I have run, Subtero and CrossFit included. Not for a website, not for graphic design. My own hands, every time. People assume gym owners hire that stuff out. I never did, because the IT guy was still in the room the whole time.

For a while, AI did not change any of that. Two years ago it was a chatbot. I played with it like a toy. I ran Dungeons and Dragons campaigns through it, built characters, let it improvise a dungeon master voice. It was fun. Then I parked it, the way you park any toy.

What pulled me back was the agentic shift. A chatbot answers you. An agent gets a goal, a set of tools, and a task it carries out on its own. Once I saw that, the old knowledge came back out. I went back to Python and HTML, stuff I had assumed was a closed chapter. Turns out I was only waiting for a reason that mattered.

So when people act surprised that a gym coach builds agents, I get it. From where they stand, it looks like a shift. Two unrelated things stapled together.

It was never a shift. It was a return. The IT guy was there first.