The Alchemist's Current Brew

Still Director of Engineering by trade — shipping systems, keeping teams unstuck, and trying not to let the character sheet's HP bar dip too low (562/623, for anyone keeping score).

Lately most of the interesting work is at the seam between "write the code myself" and "conduct an AI familiar while it writes the code" — routing between Claude, GPT, and local models depending on how much the task actually needs, instead of reaching for the biggest hammer by default. If that sounds interesting, the AI/LLM notebook is where that thinking gets written down properly; /uses has the toolchain itself.

Off the clock: still tending a small home ecosystem of 5 cats and 2 fish (a surprisingly effective focus-testing environment), still chipping away at Chinese the same stubborn way I picked up English — through the games, not the textbook — and still treating gardening as the one debugging loop that doesn't have a stack trace.

(This is a now page — it's supposed to go stale and then get updated, not stay accurate forever. If it's been a while since July 2026, assume some of this has drifted.)