Josh makes visual essays about software, design, and the systems people build together.
Founder, builder, generalist.
I build a lot of stuff with Frontier AI. Based in SF.
Projects I've worked on
Lore
My current work. We are building an AI agent harness at the frontier.
happycampr
An AI voice pre-screener for high-volume hourly hiring. Every applicant takes a five-minute voice screen, and the hiring team gets a scored transcript and a recommendation.
DeathBench
An open count of deaths that AI chatbots contributed to, by company. Each case is reviewed against a published standard, with the evidence and sources shown.
Oathbound
A trust layer for Claude Code skills. Publishers verify their identity, each skill gets a security audit, and the audit is cryptographically tied to the exact code reviewed.
The Garden
Essays
Quiet Interfaces: Designing Software That Knows When to Shut Up
On notification fatigue, ambient signals, and the case for tools that respect your attention
Chatbots Should Argue Back
On agreeable assistants, flattery, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions
Shipping With Agents: Twelve Months of Delegating My Own Job
What changed, what broke, and what I would never hand to a model again
A Garden, Not a Feed
Why I stopped publishing to timelines and started tending a slow, imperfect collection of notes
Notes
Agents Need Boundary Objects, Not Better Prompts
Reading Logs as a Thinking Tool
Design Tokens Are Social Contracts
Why We Estimate Badly, and Why That Is Fine
Local-First Software, Two Years In
The Blank Page Problem in AI Tools
Pairing With a Model Is Not Pair Programming
Fieldnotes on Standups
CSS Is a Programming Language, and That Is the Point
Keyboard-First Is a Culture, Not a Feature
Documentation Debt Compounds Faster Than Code Debt
Demo-Driven Development
Patterns
Ambient Presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space on the web
Breadcrumb History
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they have been over an exploratory journey
Live Documents
Shareable, browser-based documents that can compute and run code
Command Palettes
Command bars you can summon from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut
Scoped Scripting
Small areas within a graphical interface where users can read and write simple programmes
Folk Workflows
People reappropriating existing software for purposes it was never designed for
Progressive Disclosure
Revealing complexity only as someone demonstrates they are ready for it
Undo Everything
Making every action reversible so people can explore without fear
