zach.dev
StartupCities
StoresData
Automation.co
LearnClaude.ai
Who?I'm a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Have fun exploring!
Click the Start Menu to learn more.
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
AI Behavioral Nudges and Stacked PRs
I'm a Neanderthal who still wants to read the code I merge. But agent PRs are too big! They drive me crazy.
With "accept all" and "auto mode" a single task touches dozens of files and edits hundreds or thousands of lines. It'll only get faster and more autonomous from here.
I've found a way to fix this: a hook that repeatedly nags Claude to commit once it has finished a logical unit of work.
(I call the pattern "AI behavioral nudge.")
Any time it changes a file, the hook reads the diff and says "Hey Claude, you've edited X lines in Y files, you sure it's not time for a commit?"
It's simple but effective. After some edits, Claude will proactively propose a slice back to me: "I think we can ship {some change} as one unit."
When I approve, a skill calls Graphite to land a focused, stacked PR. No more brain-breaking 10,000 line PRs.
It's a bit embarrassing to have to build tools to enforce this kind of engineering discipline, but such is software in 2026.
Repo with skill + hook: claude-stacked-prs
