How I work

I identify a pattern of manual labour, organise it into an underlying principle, and that principle becomes a tool.

That sentence is the through-line across 30 years of work. The domain changes — music, code, archive, browser — but the principle doesn't. A Bulletin Board System (BBS) in 1992 and an agentic AI browser in 2026 are the same principle, 34 years apart.

The pattern, by domain

Domain	Pattern identified	Principle	Tool it became
Bulletin Board System (1992)	community & info siloed in closed systems	one place where everything connects	Cloudcity BBS — files, messages, online competitions
Music (1994–)	obscure, little-known research invisible to the public	encode it in titles, artwork, timing	260+ Lackluster releases
MERLib archive (2004–)	research scattered across dying websites	archive everything, connect everything	a living free-energy / LENR library
Paketti (2012–)	click-heavy, mouse-bound DAW workflow	every repeated action = one keypress	a keyboard-driven workflow suite for Renoise
Apple automation (2026)	66 apps of undocumented automation	extract → generate → make findable & speakable	hundreds of workflows, Spotlight & Siri surfaces
Agentic browser (2026)	the web siloed into tabs that don't connect	the browser as a knowledge operating system	agentic-browser research & features

I'm an interpreter, not a job title

I don't position by credential or category. I'm an interpreter — I feel what's missing in a system and channel the fix. That's why the work looks cross-domain from the outside but is one motion from the inside: every project lowers the resistance between a person and something they could already reach. Musical thought → musical output. Information → knowledge. Obscure, little-known research → the public. The current is already there; I remove what's in its way.

In QA & product work: I close the gap

The clearest expression of the principle is testing. Most testing is run from a silo — a tester gets a build thrown over the wall, files a hundred tickets, and a product owner decides which ones matter. I work the opposite way:

• I sit between designer, developer, and AI, not behind a wall. Designers show me a wireframe; I write the tests for how it should behave before the code exists (spec-driven / test-driven). Markets and salespeople sell the feature first and ask "can we build it?" later — so a clear spec up front is the most valuable thing in the room.
• I close the gap, I don't just report it. I build the simple fix locally, verify it works, and hand a senior developer a confirmed patch — because a senior's time belongs on high-impact architecture, not on a typo. I'll happily "cosplay" a junior dev to make the real fix land faster.
• I refuse the 4-o'clock silo. A build lands at 15:59 with an obvious crash-on-launch; if gloves come off at four and nobody looks until nine the next morning, that's a bottleneck. A two-minute sanity check while the developer is still online means a working build by morning.
• I built my own AI development assistant at my last role — a local helper that learned the product's architecture and code conventions from the team's own commits and how they talked about them, then could take a designer's screenshot of a wrong icon, fix it, and turn around a verified build. I optimise every bottleneck I find, on both sides of it.
• I have "red-pen psychosis." I can't read a restaurant menu without seeing every stray comma and misalignment — and an app is the same. If 150 automated tests pass but the thing is visually broken or takes 17 clicks to do one job, it isn't done. I push back on that, constructively, and offer the alternative.

Why this matters to whoever hires me

I integrate into a company and live and breathe the product — it isn't a thing I switch on when the office door opens and off when it closes. I work best with the autonomy to find the place and time where I do my sharpest work, deeply focused rather than in an open-plan room with seventeen conversations at once. Give me a small, agile team where the role isn't "test it, list it, throw it back over the wall," and I close gaps nobody else was looking at.

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The drop: Not a tester in a box filing tickets — I sit between designer, developer, and AI and close the gap until the product actually works and feels right.