About
Practice
I am a forward deployed engineer working at the boundary between AI agents and the software they are permitted to change. My work begins from one conviction: an autonomous system is only as trustworthy as the state it reads and the discipline with which it writes. I build that state as typed, human-readable documents, admit every change through a validated contract, and make the result portable enough to survive a change of vendor, of environment or of owner.
That conviction has produced an open specification (SSSS), a memory system for coding agents (Total Recall) with a plugin architecture around it, and two multi-tenant platforms that run on both: festech.live for artist collectives and UltraChat for AI-operated businesses.
Principles
- Documents before databases. Canonical state is a vault of Markdown with typed frontmatter. Relational tables are projections, rebuilt from the documents rather than trusted in their place.
- Contracts before convenience. Agents submit envelopes; a kernel validates, authorizes, leases and commits them, and a change exists only when its event is recorded.
- Instructions are compiled. What an agent has been taught is written into the files it reads before it acts, not left to retrieval and chance.
- Fail closed. A check that examined nothing did not pass. A command that can spend money or revoke a credential states its plan before acting.
- Publish the standard. A system worth depending on deserves a specification and a conformance suite that others can implement without my involvement.
Method
Every engagement begins with an audit of the existing code and a baseline run of its tests. Requirements, architecture, a development plan and a tracker follow before implementation, and quality gates run on dedicated hardware before anything reaches production. Claims about a system are verified against its code before they are written down, including on this site.
Toolbox
TypeScript and Node.js, Python, React, Next.js, Expo, Express, tRPC, PostgreSQL and Supabase, SQLite vector search, Ollama and hosted model APIs, Asterisk and carrier telephony, Headscale meshes, Vercel and DigitalOcean.
Elsewhere