Built by Alain

An AI-native software firm from your friendly neighborhood forward deployed engineer.

Our work spans a few fields, but what ties it together is a single aim: to use technology to make people's work and lives better, in service of the person using it rather than at their expense. Here's why that matters to us.

We consult for businesses, orgs, and agencies and are also working on our own standalone products. If any of this sounds like something you need, write to us through the contact form.

• Knowledge work & education: FlowCoach, a macOS app that tracks where your attention goes while you work and helps you get it back.
• Public transit: consulting and AI implementation with transit agencies.
• SMBs: websites, custom software, and empowering local businesses and orgs to use AI usefully and responsibly.

Work

• FlowCoach: a native macOS menu-bar app that notices when you drift from what you said you'd work on and nudges you back. Everything runs on-device. It started as a way to fix our own attention, and the interesting problems turned out to be about keeping false positives low without sending anything to a server.
• Solace Diaries: a custom website evoking Solace Diaries' unique style, built on top of Shopify's backend.
• Deep Learning Training Speedups: a class project on making training runs faster. Using deterministic augmentation on the GPU sped up CIFAR-10 training by 2.8%; PaLM-style parallel transformer blocks with fused kernels sped up NanoGPT and cut memory 7.5% on 8×H100s.

Manifesto

"Undoubtedly, technological innovation has been a source of many advancements, serving to amplify human intent and capabilities. Yet, like any tool, it can be deployed productively or destructively, depending on the ethical considerations underlying its design and use."– Bahá'í International Community, Reflections of Our Values: Digital Technologies and a Just Transition, 2021

We've all felt the effects of technology deployed destructively, to varying degrees, and the example that touches nearly everyone is social media. It has done real good, connecting millions of people and giving a platform to voices and news that wouldn't otherwise have one. But in the final analysis it is extractive. In exchange for entertainment and connection, it takes something from us: our attention, our ability to focus, and our capacity to live in the present. It polarizes our views and, through that, divides us. None of this was an accident of the technology itself. It is the predictable result of products designed, deployed, and monetized to maximize engagement, because engagement is what sells ads. Humanity gained a great deal from social media, and paid for it in ways we're only beginning to understand.

We believe technology can be designed, deployed, and productized without extracting from the people who use it, and that the difference comes down to where the profit comes from. A company can earn money by delivering value to its users, or it can earn money by capturing their attention and selling it. We're building for the first kind. This means AI features that support human judgment rather than replace it, products that encourage good habits rather than exploit bad ones, and a business that gets paid because it genuinely made someone's life better, not because it kept them scrolling. FlowCoach is our first real attempt at this, and we're still learning what it takes to do it well. We warmly welcome feedback and ideas from anyone thinking about the same problems.