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
magic-diff
Recently a friend of mine, Chong-U Lim was talking about copy and pasting git diffs into Claude. The obvious idea was: why not automate the whole process?
So I wrote magic-diff, a command-line tool that automates the process of writing git commit messages.
You stage your changes as usual, then tool generates a commit message for you using an LLM of your choice.
Key Features
- Automatically generates git commit messages based on staged changes
- Uses AI (via the
llmCLI) to create contextual and descriptive messages - Copies the generated message to your clipboard for easy pasting
- Supports multiple clipboard tools (pbcopy, xclip, clip, wl-copy)
- Intelligently excludes common lock files from the diff to focus on meaningful changes
How It Works
magic-diff is designed to be simple to use:
- Stage your changes with
git add - Run
magic_diff - Paste the generated commit message
Under the hood, magic-diff captures your staged diff, sends it to an AI model via the llm CLI, and processes the response to create a suitable commit message.
Check out the GitHub repository for full installation instructions and usage details.
Jan 12 2025
<< Previous
Reality is a Game of Trial and Error
Next >>
check-for-api-keys
zach.dev
About Me
Music On
Home
Blog
Programming
Entrepreneurship
Speaking
Adventure
Unschooling
03:41 PM
