zach.dev
StartupCities
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LearnClaude
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!
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Only the Hardest Parts Remain
Using AI coding agents all day feels mentally tiring in a different way than long days building pre-AI.
First, an undisciplined AI workflow will destroy you. Agents serve up endless unstructured decisions and noise until your brain melts.
But once you design a good workflow, the day still feels different. In the past, you could escape to productive but "easier" work like writing tests or refactoring code.
Now it feels like only the hardest parts of software remain:
- system design problems with hard, abstract implications
- endless code reviews and detailed verification of system behavior
- nitty gritty project management tasks to structure work for the agent
In many ways this is amazing. It's what engineers should spend their brain power on!
But it's also a very different day to day.
Much about the software lifecycle and engineer tooling will need to change to help people do these abstract tasks the same way that the IDE helped people write code.
