The situation
The mobile games industry that employed me for most of two decades got hit hard: contraction, layoffs, and an AI shift that has a lot of brilliant people scared for their craft. I was out of a full-time seat for a while (partly the market, partly a deliberate choice to be home with two young kids). The easy move was to treat AI as the thing that came for my job.
I made the opposite bet: that the tool that disrupts a craft is also the best thing that ever happened to anyone who can direct craft. So I stopped reading about it and started building with it.
What I set out to prove
- That a designer who can’t hand-write a backend can still ship one, by directing, not typing.
- That seventeen years of systems judgment transfers directly to working with AI.
- That “solo” doesn’t have to mean “small” anymore.
The approach · direct it like a team
I’ve spent my career telling engineers and designers what “good” looks like and reviewing until it got there. It turns out directing a model is the same job: set the vision, define done, hand over the problem instead of the steps, then review hard and own the calls it can’t make.
So I built a system for it: a personal operating system with specialist roles (capture & planning, building, research) running over a Markdown knowledge graph that gives the AI persistent memory across sessions. The guardrails are borrowed from good engineering culture: think before coding, build the simplest thing, make surgical changes, work toward a definition of done. The skill that carries the whole thing isn’t syntax. It’s decomposition, taste, and knowing the moment an answer is wrong.
I’d spent a career telling a team what “good” looks like and reviewing until it got there. Directing a model turned out to be the same job.
What I built
A self-governing personal OS
A three-agent system over a structured knowledge base that plans my week, keeps a journal, runs research routines, and remembers context between sessions instead of starting cold each time. It’s the workbench everything else gets built from, and proof that I think in systems and operating models, not one-off prompts.
An 11-game web arcade
A scatter of prototype game repos, consolidated into a single deploy with a gallery front end and one clean home for everyone to play. Midway through, the platform blocked the obvious path; rather than stall, I had the build re-route its own architecture: repurpose an existing home, re-point everything, ship. Turning a hard constraint into a one-move workaround is the same instinct I’ve always brought to design.
A card-game engine with live multiplayer
Multiplayer Deck Garage, a browser workshop where card games are modules on one shared engine: a real 52-card deck, a poker hand evaluator, and host-authoritative networking. A dozen games and design tools plug in, and any of them can be dealt to friends live over a room code. Where the arcade was the content, this is the platform underneath it: the clearest proof that I build the systems, not just the things that run on them.
A private backend control plane
Auth, databases, and infrastructure across Neon, Supabase, and Cloudflare Workers for a handful of projects, unified behind one private “control plane” with a strict no-secrets-in-git discipline and a registry that maps exactly where every credential really lives. I ran a security pass on my own repos in the process and closed the gaps I found.
What actually made it work
- Judgment over syntax. The muscle that balanced a 200+ character roster (decompose the problem, define done, review for correctness, decide under ambiguity) is the exact muscle that gets good work out of a model.
- Systems thinking as the unlock. The reason I could direct a backend I couldn’t hand-write is that I understood the shape of the system and could tell when the pieces were wrong.
- Honesty about the edges. I’m a director and a systems designer, not a from-scratch software engineer. I know what good looks like, and I can get a model there fast. In this era, that’s the job.
Where this points
The next era rewards the people who can aim these tools with taste, who can turn intent into shipped systems and tell the difference between impressive and correct. I want to do that work, and I especially want to help the people whose industries are being remade (the way mine was) learn to wield it instead of fear it. Whether that’s a studio of my own or a team building this future, it’s the same craft I’ve practiced for seventeen years, pointed at a new kind of collaborator.