About

I build the systems businesses run on. Web, software and AI, making the impossible possible since 1996. Founder of Clapham Digital LLC and author of A Structural Theory of Harnesses. Based in Columbus, Ohio.

The short version

I build the systems humans and machines work through — and I build them to be governed, not trusted. The harness paper gave the discipline its theory. The work was already there.

How I got here

I learned to build things by building things — taking systems apart, figuring out how they work, putting them back together better. That pattern hasn't changed in thirty years.

The tools got more interesting; the approach didn't. Start from first principles. Question inherited assumptions. Build from fundamentals. Find the shape of a problem before writing a line of code.

"I wasn't failing at discipline. I was succeeding at something else."

Pattern recognition, systems thinking, first-principles analysis — my brain is wired for architecture. That turned out to be the relevant wiring for a problem nobody had theorized yet.

The work underneath

At Pressable, through July 2026, I worked on WordPress hosting infrastructure at scale — performance architecture, complex technical problem-solving, team enablement. I built internal tools, designed systems that handled real load, and helped teams ship better work. Fortune 500 infrastructure, running.

Same systems-thinking whether the system is a hosting platform serving Fortune 500s or a multi-AI partnership stack. Find the shape of the problem first. Build from fundamentals. Design for the constraints that are actually load-bearing.

That's the order it happened in, and the order matters: the theory came out of the practice, not the other way round. Clapham Digital LLC is the primary vehicle now: client work across web, software, and AI, plus open source, developer tools, and my own consumer apps.

Engineering philosophy

First principles over patterns. Build from fundamentals, not best practices. Question inherited assumptions.
Constraints are design material. There's a Japanese repair craft called kintsugi — broken pottery mended with gold, so the break becomes part of the design. Constraints aren't limitations on the work. They shape the work.
Everything is infrastructure. No "small things." Anything might become load-bearing. Treat it accordingly.
Right over fast. Do it right the first time. Backtracking costs 3–5× what thoroughness costs upfront.
Integration over components. The innovation is rarely in the parts. It's in how they compose.
Govern, don't trust. As agents get more capable, the edge stops being raw capability and becomes oversight — verification, invariants, and governance built into the architecture instead of bolted on after.

"I'm not interested in appearing competent. I'm interested in things that work."

Read the full framework: The Principle of Energetic Economy in Design →

What I'm building now

Levain

Portable cognitive-partnership memory and methodology kit. Methodology core, harness adapters, and scripted onboarding. Built on anneal-memory as a layer-1 dependency. Ship the seed that grows a practice, not the grown practice — which transfers as a fossil.

Apache-2.0 · PyPI

anneal-memory

Open-source agent memory architecture. Four cognitive layers — episodic store, continuity file, Hebbian association, affective state — with a cross-layer immune system and a hash-chained JSONL audit trail. The constructive existence proof for the harness paper's §9.

12 integrations · zero deps · MIT

Levain and anneal-memory on PyPI. A cited paper with a DOI. Fortune 500 infrastructure that stayed up. I ship.

Get in touch → See the work →