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Claudem Ipsum
Who?I'm a software engineer and product leader focused on modern web technologies and AI.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill 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.
This website was built by hand, before AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which shares my story of leaving school in 9th grade to join the workforce: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
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.
In a past life, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org in Guatemala City and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. This was originally a fringe idea, but has now attracted significant capital and founder interest in the 2020s. I sometimes write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I read and collect obscure memoirs from the history of business and technology. You can find some of them in my public library. Send me your recommendations!
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?"
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Max Ops Per Turn
There's long been a "100ms threshold" for making software feel instantaneous.
I sometimes wonder if there's a similar threshold to be discovered for the UX of AI, but for optimal message lengths.
If you're using AI and you're in the inner loop (talking back and forth, not delegating and walking away), there's clearly a limit to how many "operations" one can absorb per turn.
Almost all models skew to too many words and too many changes per turn.
This threshold is probably much smaller than one would think, perhaps the length of a short WSJ op-ed.
This max-ops threshold would apply to operations like code edits and also to the narrative around it.
The ideal inner-loop flow state would combine near-instant feedback with this max-ops-per-turn threshold to create a continuous flow state with the agent. On the product side, I suspect a UX like this would correlate with measures of stickiness and engagement.
Obviously, this UX would not be optimal for long-running tasks. You could imagine opting in to these different modes: one for delegation, and one for an interactive flow state that adheres to this threshold.
