For CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical founders
Two senior people, engineering and design, who build with agents every day. We will change how your team works, take a product end to end, or hold a standing seat on yours.
Start a conversationFive things. They stand alone or stack, and which one fits depends on where your team already is. Same two people either way.
A day with your engineers, on your own repo and your real problems, then we stay on through the first workstream they run this way. Most teams bought a completion tool and stopped there. The distance between that and agent-driven engineering is larger than it looks from the inside.
Agents are only as good as what they can read, and most of what your company knows was never written down. We build the layer that fixes that: architecture decisions, domain rules, the reasons behind the last three rewrites, structured so an agent produces work that fits your company instead of work that fits any company.
We take a product or a workstream end to end, built the way we teach. Consumer apps at real scale, hardware, fintech, marketplaces. This is the fastest thing on this page to start, because there is nothing to schedule and nothing to roll out first.
Standing time with JD. Architecture, hiring, technical due diligence, and the decisions that are expensive to get wrong and lonely to make. For companies that need the judgment before they need the headcount.
Standing time with Alec. Product direction, interface work, and the design review your team does not currently have. Three consumer apps taken from zero to launch.
Two people. Both of them on your engagement, both of them doing the work.
Engineering
Head of Engineering at AfterHour and Alpha. Before that, Brava, acquired by Middleby ($MIDD). RealCrowd, YC S13. Disney / Playdom. Coversant. Associated Press. US patent holder. Thirty years shipping products, and the last two of them almost entirely agent-driven.
Product and design
Founding product designer at AfterHour and Alpha. Built Ultraviolet to 13,000 paying daily users. Before that, CloudKitchens. Three consumer apps taken from zero to launch.
Consumer scale, hardware, fintech, and marketplaces. Shipped, not prototyped.
AI-powered trading companion that learns your style and goals. Personalized market analysis, copy trading, and portfolio management.
Cross-platform web and mobile games and shared infrastructure reaching >1M daily active users.
200K+ retail investors with $400M+ in assets. Social networking, moderation, big scale public chat, and real-time trade alerts.
Smart oven with computer vision, custom Linux OS, realtime camera feed, and companion apps. Acquired by Middleby ($MIDD).
First direct-investment commercial real estate marketplace. YC S13.
Every one of these is public on LinkedIn and written by someone who was on the team.
He is able to break down complex topics and explain them to laymen. He's an excellent teacher and mentor across multiple teams and disciplines.
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JD is a straight-shooting, hard-working, visionary software developer and leader. I worked with JD for 5+ years at Brava and his work ethic, curiosity and attention to detail are exemplary. I didn't come from a software background and there was an immense amount of cross-functional work between our teams. JD was patient in bringing me and my team up to speed. He is able to break down complex topics and explain them to laymen. He's an excellent teacher and mentor across multiple teams and disciplines. JD is an expert in software development, but his interests and passions outside software, including cooking (especially BBQ), fitness and technology, also drive him professionally. He is not deterred by difficult obstacles, and he is realistic and accurate in his assessments of what it will take to overcome those challenges. I would be honored to work with JD again and would recommend him to anyone looking to build groundbreaking products and services.
Technically, he's simply the best I've worked with. He has an instinct for where complexity is earned and where it's just noise, and he builds accordingly.
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I was hired at Afterhour as an iOS engineer. By the time we were building Alpha together, I was working across the full stack. That shift happened because of JD. He's the kind of engineer who pulls people up without making it feel like a lesson. He'd loop me into architectural decisions, ask my opinion on things outside my lane, and trust me to own problems I hadn't tackled before. That's rare. Most engineers protect their domain, JD expands yours. Technically, he's simply the best I've worked with. He has an instinct for where complexity is earned and where it's just noise, and he builds accordingly. But beyond the craft, he's genuinely a great person to be in the trenches with. Calm under pressure, generous with his time, and the kind of teammate who makes the whole team better just by being there.
JD is a world class engineering leader. Sees the big picture of any business or challenge and executes with teams to deliver at the highest quality.
He built our full stack from scratch, took us through multiple products and tech stacks, and led a team that consistently punched above its weight. If you need someone to take an idea from 0 to 1, I'd bet on JD every time.
JD would learn new technology in an instant and become an expert. Awesome developer, great architect, excellent technical mentor, all around rockstar.
JD's guidance was actionable, relevant, and non-consensus, and he was right. One of those you remember for years and seek opportunities with again.
Equally at ease starting companies, leading development teams, and writing code. For someone so brilliant, he's also kind, easy to work with, and calm under intense challenges.
He architected literally the whole stack, from mobile apps all the way up to infrastructure, and never broke a sweat. No challenge too big, no product feature too hard to build.
Incredibly structured and disciplined, yet very pragmatic when it comes to building stuff that just works. It's rare to find someone with such talent even in Silicon Valley.
Wherever he goes, success will follow. His technical expertise is both broad and deep. JD has done amazing things for Playdom.
He's able to take a high-level complex problem and break it down into digestible parts. One of the top leaders I've ever worked with.
JD has breadth and depth. He creates solutions that scale smoothly supporting millions of users. He's more than an architect, he's an extremely productive developer.
He isn't shy about tackling big projects and helping others along with theirs, and if he sees an opportunity to help you, he will. I would gladly be on any technical team with JD.
JD is a super engineer. Remarkably he shows mastery over every OS, programming language, and IDE that someone might want to use.
I'd come in with an overengineered solution and he'd ask two questions that cut it in half, not by dumbing it down, but by seeing the angle I missed. That saved us weeks.
His vast talent and experience is hard to come by, but it's his love of what he does that makes me respect him most.
Projects are a fixed scope for a fixed number, retainers are a fixed number per month. You know it before anything starts and it does not move partway through.
JD and Alec do the work. No juniors on your account, no bench, no handoff to someone you have not met.
The workshop runs on your repo and your real problems. Everything built during it is yours and it ships.
The result we are aiming at is your team keeping the practice after we are gone, not a standing monthly invoice.
Tell us what your team is working on and where it is slow. JD reads and answers these himself, usually the same day.