What I'm Up To Now, Besides No Good
I'm a product engineer by training and by heart, maybe what Ian McGilchrist calls fundamentally right-brained, because I love form as much as function. It's a bit heretical but I still think UX is very much not dead, and I don't think chatbots are the ultimate way we're going to interact with our agents (or humans).
I'm pretty AI-pilled. It's hard not to be when you live in SF, but especially as a tinkerer-engineer it's been SO much fun! For all that, I do think there are a lot of social and philosophical questions we'll face and the one I'm drawn to most is the economic one. Because 1) material survivability is the base of Maslow's pyramid and 2) I genuinely think we have a shot at a post-scarcity future, where we can not just survive but expand our autonomy and capacity to do great things — but history doesn't happen on its own. It takes actual effort, experimentation, civic participation, a lot of people willing to not just build but *care* about what we should build. That's why my friend and I created postlabor.dev to encourage folks of all stripes to experiment on new ways of self-organizing and creating value with AI. We're exploring ways to see if AI can deeply understand our preferences (and in a higher-order sense, not just revealed preference) as individuals and as groups.
I've also been working on an infra project with my closest collaborator, my husband :P More on that soon. The rest of the time, I'm hacking on a variety of projects (I'm a chronic hackathoner — met my husband at one!), playing with my Openclaw bots, and scheming up ways to get weirdos in a room together. I've always cared a lot about community and scenius — I've helped build group houses in NYC and SF, hung out in philosophy salons like Interintellect, and I just think the best things happen when you get great people in proximity. I'm always working on a few creative writing projects as well, though god knows when I will actually publish any of them 😅
Main Projects On-Deck (as of early 2026)
Secret stealth thing - a coordination project starting in the infra space 👀
AIMibot — The AI tamagotchi, for us grown-up kids :) A little voice wearable that acts like a cute pet, grows as you talk with it, and comes in six different tribes.
Daphne — An autonomous fiction harness, inspired by hyperstitionai's Unslop contest. It uses a genetic algo approach to breed narrative components over generations, mutating and recombining candidates across different models until it lands on a favorite blueprint. From there it drafts scenes, assembles the manuscript, and runs autoresearch-style hill-climbing loops on the full story. At the meta level above that, it proposes experiments to make the harness itself better. Stories will be posted on this site until I run out of tokens XD
Fundraising CRM — A gigantic fundraising CRM I built for friends and teams at the Lightyear residency, handling research, intro paths, and email ops across thousands of contacts. It's time to get out of spreadsheets!
🛠️ Other Projects
Historia — A personal wiki+CRM powered by my Hermes agent, tracking my messages, reads, and pretty much all the context it can get its hands on to build an ontology of every person/place/thing in my orbit. My plan is to use it to power a little digital twin of myself to help folks find interesting events and potential friends around the city.
postlabor.dev — A community for technologists, researchers, and builders who care about shaping the future of work in the AI age. We host events, run hackathons, build experimental projects like autonomous companies, and other content. I recently published a thesis laying out a 'state of the union' for the current debates around automation and the ideas that are emerging, and I maintain an auto-curated reading list of the best reads on the topic.
A new residency in SF — I'm exploring a new residency in SF for scientists, founders, and serious thinkers who care deeply about how to make AI go well. You can see an early preview at Epilogue House. More on this soon 👀
Ad Infinitum — Won the self-improving agents hackathon. An agent that autonomously creates ad campaigns, runs them on Meta, and uses learnings from each round to improve. We're spinning this out into a kind of "reverse Kickstarter", where AI proposes and evolves campaigns using a genetic algo so humans can choose to ship the winners. Our thesis is that AI makes it easier than ever to build, but hard to know what.
whencanwe.app — A little scheduling app I built because coordinating my friends is like herding cats! Here you can just attach your google cal and/or select fav time slots, it'll figure out the one that matches everyone's preferences.
Etsy Generator — A pipeline for Etsy digital goods that hunts for trends in niche fandoms (bookclub niches and similar rabbit holes) to build little digital goods like bookclub kits.
Naggy AI - web demo — A Flutter app I built over the holidays to help my ADHD husband actually do his tasks. It's a cute little voice agent that calls you until you do your task, and will body-double with you too like an ADHD coach. My husband says it's really helped him (and is especially effective at 1) getting him out of social events and 2) making him look incredibly busy). Most importantly, it's named after our cat Aggy, an orange with a remarkable sense of time (namely mealtime).
Homeship Pilot — An experimental project I built for me and my husband. These are personal agents that have all our context, that then talk to each other or a shared agent to coordinate tasks. The idea is to see if we can find win-win scenarios by sharing our data — like a household copilot.
MyGeneHealth — Upload your raw 23andMe data and get detailed analysis of thousands of your genetic markers, researched across multiple science sources refreshed monthly.
Upwork Mission Control — Hackathon project for the Remote Labor hackathon, where we tried to defeat the remotelabor.ai bench. This scrapes Upwork and other tasker sites for easily automatable tasks (e.g. logo design) and solves hundreds at once. The core add-on from the remotelabor bench is that an implementer works with an evaluator agent to pick the best output or retry until passing, since very few can one-shot a real task.
Detecting MechaHitler — Won the def/acc hackathon. Based on the emergent misalignment paper: can we detect unintended behavioral changes from an RL training run? Like, you train a model to be more helpful in customer service and accidentally get a gaslighting enthusiast... or you train it to be more uwu and end up with MechaHitler.
text2viz.dev — Quick AI visual diagram creator for any essay, in various styles.
kyo.bio — Kyo is a little bird who introduces you to people you want to meet. I built this for the Democratize Intelligence conference. Kyo chats with people over email to understand who they are and what they need, then makes the best mutual matches using a custom reranker under the hood. It makes a spiffy graph!
Framework Zero — An infrastructure layer to integrate human preferences into autonomous organizations. We're heading towards a fully automated future, and we need it to be one where human preferences at scale can be represented. I've been particularly interested in the digital twins piece — agents that know your preferences and can represent you. We finished the Dagihouse accelerator and have been running an event series on post-labor economics.
Frontier Tower Coordination bot - A Telegram bot for Frontier Tower to help coordinate actions around the tower, including searching for info, polls, attaching doc sources etc.
Autonomous Fanfic Gen — Like webtoons but for fanfic. Plug in your fandom, plot idea, tags and ships and this agent will scaffold outline, characters, scene beats before generating chapter by chapter. An evaluator loop then scores and re-gens for the best writing.
Two Degrees — A platform for matchmakers to better matchmake their friends. People are sick of dating apps, and for good reason! Intros from friends and people in your network are a much better way to meet — it just takes a better tool to do so :)
FicWorld — Inspired by the Bookworld paper, this is a story-making experiment in emergent fiction. Every character is their own agent with memory, personality, backstory, and emotional state, responding to a world driven by a World Agent and woven into stories by Plot Agents and Narrators.
⚡ Some other little things I've built in the last few months
- Idea Factory Automator — a joke project to autogenerate a hundred product ideas in any topic and deploy them all at once
- An autonomous agent for my friend's beef jerky startup (yes, really)
- An epub summarizer for long books
- iMessage semantic search — for when you can't remember who said what in your texts
- Tweet to Printful — convert any tweet into a print-on-demand card
- Poetry recommender — get a poem for your taste from the Poetry Foundation
- Celebrity lookalike app — see who you resemble in the CelebA dataset
- Tumblr vibes generator — get a personality analysis and image vibe for your Tumblr blog
- Various projects for Frontier Tower, where I'm on the AI floor
Some of my ongoing non-coding goals:
- make a comic series about my cats Meow Meow and Aggy, the most agentic frenemies in a hacker house in SF
- start up an actual substack for posting my writing
- finish Dan Carlins's Supernova in the East series and a bunch more of his old ones - currently on a Pacific theater and modern Chinese history kick
- read and figure out my favs of the last few years of astralcodexten's book review contests (a repo up to 2023 here, complete 2024 collection here, the 2024 finalists)
- ACX-style book reviews are one of my absolute favorite ways to dive into a subject I don't know much about, but don't have the time to read a 500-page book on. They're so more engaging and insightful than LLMs or Blinkist and the best ones offer not just a summary but pull together an incredible array of historical context and critical analysis like this one on The Weirdest People in the World or this one on The Educated Mind.
- work on my epic fantasy novel series about a world where colossal kaiju are harbingers of cataclysmic natural disasters, yet leave behind in their wake elemental ores that grant humans superpowers. Great kingdoms rise and fall in their struggle for dominance until the Once and Future War ends with the annihilation of the Imperial family and The Sunless Throne. tldr; Vengeance is a patient ore, and it never forgets.
You can follow along a running log of my random draft-tweet thoughts here. I also publish a sporadically-updated substack called everythingireadtoday that rounds up fun longreads I've found around the web - these are usually in economics, sociology, tech news, science, psychology, progress studies et al, but really just about anything that I find interesting.
Books I'm reading as of 2025:
Current/finished non-fiction reads:
- Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson)
- Humankind: A Hopeful History (Rutger Bregman)
- Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China(Evan Osnos)
- absolutely engrossing, so many wild stories of some inspirational figures I'd never heard of like the blind peasant lawyer and the peasant girl who founded China's largest dating site
- In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work (Kyla Scanlon)
- Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (Timothy P. Carney)
- Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
- Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
- The Lost Art of Listening (Michael P Nichols)
- ThinkerToys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (Michael Michalko)
- The Wayfinders (Wade Davis)
- Jane Austen: Game Theorist (Michael Suk-Young Chwe)
- Wild Problems : A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us (Russ Roberts)
- 30 Second Philosophies (Julian Baggini)
- The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
- How the World Made the West (Josephine Quinn)
Current/finished fiction reads:
- The Mars House (Natasha Pulley)
- Zoey is Too Drunk for this Dystopia (Jason Pargin)
- The Bee Sting (Paul Murray)
- Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
- Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
- The Best of Greg Egan
- Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage (Alice Munro)
- Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)
- Jade Legacy - The Green Bone Saga #3 (Fonda Lee)
- Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
- Valuable Humans in Transit (qntm)
- A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik)
- Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)