Software engineering, applied AI, and machine learning
I build software and write about what I learn.
I've spent more than 20 years building software and roughly a decade working in ML and AI. I write longer pieces here and share what I’m trying, reading, and listening to in a regular digest. You can also find my day-to-day thinking on X.
Selected writing
All essays →Five Lessons from Putting AI Into Research Teams
Which tasks to automate, where analysts push back, and how to tell if a workflow is quietly getting worse - five lessons from a...
Four Building Blocks for Document Generation Agents
File system access and tool calling, structured outputs, testing, and context tracing - combined into a feedback loop that lets your agents improve over...
Tool Calling and File Access: When AI Can Run Commands on Your Actual Files
Instead of uploading files to a chat window, give the model access to your file system and let it run commands directly. Here's what...
Working notes
Finding the things I saved and never read
I built a CLI for my Twitter archive, then asked Claude Code to find twenty longer pieces I'd saved and never gone back to read.
Experienced engineers still matter
I miss writing code, but the experience I built doing it still shapes how I work with agents.
Companies need people to implement AI
In my work with teams, everyone already has a job, and figuring out how AI changes it often belongs to nobody.
Experiments and conversations
All experiments →The Listening Index
1,404 takeaways from 173 podcast episodes, searchable by topic, show, and speaker.
Browse the index →AI in Research Teams
Seven lessons about using AI in investment research, built as a single interactive page instead of a slide deck.
Open the page →Pacing the Frontier
All 1,134 signatories and 70 comments on the Pacing the Frontier statement, explorable, with every figure computed from the source data.
Open the page →WattsOpen
An interactive atlas of U.S. fossil plants retiring through 2030, scored on how much room the grid around them has.
Explore WattsOpen ↗What Shorewood Said
1,459 written comments from Shorewood's 2026 Community Survey, organized by theme, with the numbers behind the charts.
Explore the survey →I do client work through PragmaNexus. Its site has services, case studies, and contact information.
Visit PragmaNexus →