The person behind it
Hi. I'm Scott.
a mostlylucid productI built StyloBot because I've spent 30 years watching bots eat clients' infrastructure while the big vendors sold them overpriced SaaS that phoned home with all their data. This isn't a pivot or a side hustle. It's the accumulation of a career.
Where the name comes from
William Gibson described black ice as "king hell ice, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you." That's what most bot defences feel like to legitimate users: invisible, hostile, and happy to fire first.
StyloBot is named after my dog Stylo. Stylo is large, determined, and occasionally inconvenient. He will absolutely get between you and where you're trying to go. He would never hurt anyone. That's exactly what I wanted from bot detection: something that blocks the bad actors without punishing the humans.
Fuzzy ice. Gets in the way. Never hurts.
Background
I've spent 30+ years building and scaling engineering teams and products across Europe and North America. I was at Microsoft as an ASP.NET Program Manager on the Redmond campus. Since 2012 I've run mostlylucid limited, a consultancy that helps companies at every stage: founding engineering teams, scaling out existing ones, or rescuing systems that have got away from their original team.
My home is .NET. I've worked with ASP.NET Core since the early previews. I work across stacks pragmatically. The right tool for the job, not the fashionable one.
StyloBot is what happens when you give someone with that background a hard problem and good tooling. 49 detectors, hundreds of signals, complex behavioural aggregation, HNSW session clustering, a pgvector-backed similarity search, and a commercial fleet management layer: built by one person. That scope was only possible because of modern code LLMs. StyloBot is undiluted engineering judgment, with AI doing what AI is actually good at: accelerating the implementation of ideas that already know what they're doing.
The FOSS core is genuinely open source: MIT licensed, no telemetry, no callbacks. The commercial layer adds the bits that teams running it seriously actually need: PostgreSQL persistence, fleet management, compliance reporting, and proper support from me directly.
What I believe about bot detection
Get in touch
If you're evaluating StyloBot for something real, have a weird edge case, or just want to talk through your bot problem, email me directly. I read everything.