Where I come from

Thirty years in software: a decade writing it, a decade running product, a decade translating technology for people who don't live in it. I've built for internet startups and for highly regulated banks, where what a system may touch and who has to sign off gets settled before anyone writes a line of code. I've watched every major technology shift of that span from the inside, and the pattern holds each time. The people who come out ahead never chase the tools. They protect their judgment and point the technology at everything else.

Then AI arrived, and I did what I've always done: built with it until I understood what it was good for and where it breaks. I run my own practice on it now — the writing, the research, a knowledge system, private models on my own machine — so when I tell you what works, it's because it's working on my desk this week.

What I believe about this moment

Your expertise is the appreciating asset. Twenty years of knowing what right looks like in your field can't be prompted into existence, and it's exactly what the tools lack. What's cheap now is the work around the judgment — the reading, the drafting, the assembling, the remembering. Your hours are being compressed, not erased, and a sharp practitioner has time to adapt on purpose.

The professionals who win this shift don't become technologists. They get their judgment out of their heads and into a form that works when they're not in the room, and they let the machine do the parts their clients never paid for anyway.

Two cautions I hold to. Used lazily, AI erodes the judgment it was supposed to serve, so every routine I build has a place where you read and decide. And AI output your clients can see is the one place the failures land on your reputation. I don't build it.

How I work

• Advisor, never operator. I don't run your systems, host your data, or become your IT department. When something needs real infrastructure, I spec it, help you choose who builds it, and stay on your side of the table.
• Everything on accounts you own. Your subscription, your machine, your files. Every engagement ends with a handoff and training, and you run it without me.
• Fixed fee, agreed in writing before work starts. No hourly billing, no meter. I can't credibly tell you to sell judgment instead of hours while selling you hours.
• A person says yes. AI gathers and drafts. You decide. Nothing goes out under your name without your judgment on it.
• Nothing your clients see. All of the work sits behind you, in your back office. Your storefront stays yours.
• Plain language. You're elite at your profession and you don't need to become a technologist. Every term gets translated into your world or it gets cut.

What I'm not

I'm not a ChatGPT trainer, and I'm not a prompt library. I'm not a software shop that will build you an app and a dependency. I'm not an expert in your field, and I won't pretend to be — you are; my job is to get what's in your head into a form that works. And I'm not going to tell you the sky is falling. The change is real, and so is the time you have to meet it well.

Where I am

The South Bay of Los Angeles. I work in person locally and by video everywhere else.