It started with screws. Whatever I could open as a kid — radios, the lawnmower, anything with a back panel — I'd take apart, lay the parts out on the floor, and work out how to fit it all back together. Some of it didn't fit on the way back. I learned from that too. The lesson stuck: every system, no matter how alien at first, is a stack of parts someone built and someone else can rebuild.
Forty-plus years on, I apply the same trick to everything. Figure out what the problem actually is. Break it into pieces small enough to be honestly faced. Solve each one. Reassemble. The medium changes — software, hardware, a microgrid, a bad week, a good team, a service panel, a transmission, a kid's hard question — but the discipline does not.
I want engineers and friends around me who may not yet know the answer but won't flinch from finding it. That stance has built my career, the team I lead at Savant, and the apps I ship on weekends. It also gets the dishwasher fixed.
▲ The current toolkit
Good people. Sharp tools. Engineering as guardrails.
My job — at Savant, and on side-projects too — is to put a strong team in front of the best available tools, then get out of the way. The leader's work is the conditions, not the keystrokes. Hire people who'll grow into harder problems than they walked in with. Mentor them through the hard parts. Defend the work upward; pass the credit downward. Give them tooling that punches above its weight, and engineering principles loud enough to keep the leverage honest.
Agentic AI is the newest sharp tool in the box. I treat it like the rest — leverage, not magic. Claude Code in my editor sits next to the linter, the manual, and the colleague who'll push back on a bad PR. Each one earns its keep by accelerating correct work — not just any work.
The principles don't change. Read the diff. Test the change. Own the outcome. AI doesn't relieve a builder of judgment — it amplifies whichever judgment is already there. Sloppy taste produces sloppy output, faster. Good taste compresses years of work into months. Best people. Best tools. Engineering as guardrails. Repeat the recipe.
