Software engineer, 25 years in. AI is an easy thing to build with and a hard thing to learn next to: it removes the struggle that used to do the teaching. You can ship code you don't understand now, and mostly get away with it.
Getting people past that is what I care about most — junior engineers, career changers, anyone who arrived through vibe coding and wants more than that. Real software engineering still means understanding a system well enough to work in it alongside other people: refactoring, adding features, and leaving the codebase better than you found it.
Most of what's here is tooling — small things I built because I wanted them to exist. That category barely existed for me before AI; the tools weren't worth the days they would have cost. Now they are.
agentic-toolkit — Agent Skills, slash commands, and an installer for AI coding agents. Built on the open Agent Skills format, so each one works with any agent that reads the spec rather than a single product.
afk-viewer — Claude Code writes a JSONL transcript of everything it does: every message, every tool call, every subagent it spawns. It's all on disk, and none of it is legible while it's happening. This makes it legible, live.
focus-bot — A Telegram bot that takes a thought, a link, or a voice note and files it into Obsidian, organized. Built for the gap between having an idea and being at a keyboard, and the thing here I use most.
be-ing — Read the hard books. Difficult philosophy isn't hard because the sentences are long. It's hard because it runs on a large technical vocabulary that philosophers already share and books don't stop to explain — ordinary-looking words like being, substance, and intuition, each carrying an ancient or narrowly technical sense. Be-ing glosses every one of them in the margin, twice: what the term means across philosophy, and what this author means by it in this sentence. Live at be-ing.art.
The two largest systems I work on are closed source.
Civic Lens — An API that keeps current records on every US federal and state officeholder. Thousands of them, changing constantly, and nobody is watching the feed; agents do the maintaining, and being wrong is a real cost rather than a failed test. It grew out of thepsp.org, which has been posting daily in all fifty states for years and needed the data to be right.
sfact.io — Boots a sandboxed game server from a shared save in seconds, lets anyone walk through someone else's build, and tears the whole thing down twenty minutes later for under a penny a session. I co-founded it and built the web application.
obfuscate_id — Non-obvious ActiveRecord ids via reversible hashing. Written in 2012, still pulled in by people I've never met. 347 stars, 132 forks.
nathanamick.com/blog — technical writing, including a series on custom React hooks with worked examples in stopwatch-timer-example and kanban-board-demo.
Refactoring Consciousness — philosophy of mind and consciousness science, for software engineers. The same territory as be-ing, out loud.