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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?"
Click the Start Menu to learn more. Have fun!
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
The Burden of Decisions
I think a lot of confusion about AI comes from relatively few people having worked in a founding context.
The difference between the 80% vibe-coded solution and the 99% real product is everything. In that 20% is your ability to actually charge customers and to retain them, the ability to compete, and all areas of differentiation.
That 20% represents a million tough decisions.
These decisions are hard, because there's often no way to know the objectively correct choice. You make decisions with a mix of noisy data, intuition, forecasts on where a market or competitor may be going, and tons of annoying constraints.
This hard work hasn't disappeared.
LLMs can assume some decisions (though even these smaller "automated choices" are not without risk). But I don't think anyone can credibly claim that an executive should or can offload the really important, fuzzy decisions that make a product real and a company successful to an LLM.
Likely, we'll all increasingly feel the burden of decisions as AI implicitly promotes people into quasi-executive roles that command agents.
