Yeah, Apple would never design a donut headquarters and make their employees live inside of it /s

>Six steps, no jargon. The note beside each one is the precise technical version, for anyone who wants to check the work.

I think this is called "concept leak" or "prompt leak" (please someone correct me, I can't recall at the moment.) It is one of my least-favorite failure modes. I notice it a lot when drafting landing pages, and it eats up a lot of time to edit away.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, but not before November. Happy to go hybrid or onsite after that.

Technologies: TypeScript, Vercel AI SDK, Workflow SDK, MCP servers, Next.js, React, Node/Bun/Deno, NestJS, Postgres (Drizzle/Prisma/TypeORM), Redis, BullMQ, OpenTelemetry, Swift/SwiftUI, some Rust and Python.

Résumé/CV: https://jonwillis.dev/?utm_source=hn | https://github.com/jondwillis

Email: jw-port-burner@proton.me

I'm an AI product engineer and sometimes-founder w/ 15+ years of experience across full stack web, native, mostly startups. I have been building agent systems and I have been at it long enough to know where they break, and I am a lifelong continual learner and striver.

Currently co-founder and CTO at Valara, bootstrapped and pre-revenue, where I built an AI-native orchestrated workflow product that reviews commercial and residential real estate appraisals for lenders. I turn my co-founder's and our design partners' experiences into product features.

Before that: a little more than two years at Uni Industries building AI, agent, and data plugins across two products, including an agent harness w/ structured tool use, skill systems, and eval pipelines.

In 2023 I shipped waggledance.ai, an open-source multi-agent system with DAG-based planning and parallel execution, before things like LangGraph or reasoning models existed. Earlier I was senior iOS at Curtsy (crash-free sessions from 99% to 99.9% at hundreds of thousands of MAU) and the first mobile engineer at Pluto TV, pre-seed through Series B, with the mobile/OTT team that I help lead there driving a lot of the early traction and growth, which eventually led to an exit in 2019.

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I'm looking for a former-founder, senior, or staff IC role building AI products people actually use, or will use soon. Strongest on TypeScript, frontend, UX, agent architecture, and SDLC/ADLC.

For example, I’m working on a project to remake the Final Fantasy XI client. My repository has a bunch of git submodules that reference other peoples’ related efforts, and an open source server. For example, despite including CLAUDE.md to suggest otherwise, Claude Code always ends up writing these insanely dense comments referring to specific files and lines of code in submodules. When those submodules update, now the comments are no longer correct.

So I added a hook to detect when comments are included. Then, for example, I have a deterministic heuristic and script involved to remove some kinds of comments, and another that asks Haiku to quickly LLM-as-a-judge whether or not to edit/remove the comment.

Similarly, I have a stop hook that reminds Claude to commit its code logically on main, noting that other changes may have been added by other concurrent sessions (I avoid worktrees and even branching for this particular project and stage of development.) It works well.

I'll go ahead and accept that `Staff Software Development Engineer in Test, Cloud Applications` role, thanks ;)

Fricking training distribution/same-y ness coming for us all… cool project though.

I propose that you don’t actually want cheap tokens. You want cheap tokens in service of some other goals. Are they worth the environmental cost?