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Claudem Ipsum
Who?I'm a software engineer and product leader focused on modern web technologies and AI.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
This website was built by hand, before AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which shares my story of leaving school in 9th grade to join the workforce: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
In a past life, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org in Guatemala City and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. This was originally a fringe idea, but has now attracted significant capital and founder interest in the 2020s. I sometimes write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I read and collect obscure memoirs from the history of business and technology. You can find some of them in my public library. Send me your recommendations!
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Click the Start Menu to learn more. Have fun!
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Google Is Playing a Different AI Game
I think Google is consciously playing a different AI game. Critics say 3.8 Flash isn't as smart or autonomous as Claude or Sol.
But the "downsides" of 3.8 Flash offer a different product than Claude or Sol.
Flash is crazy fast, concise, and cheap. For writing code, Flash lets you work within the "inner loop" rather than delegating and waiting an hour for Fable to finish.
A tight feedback loop compensates for some of the mistakes that Gemini makes, because it's easier to understand smaller sets of changes in succession.
Outside of code generation, Gemini is likely the best model available on a cost-for-performance basis. This is why I (and many others) use Gemini as the workhorse for cloud workflows with clients.
So while Gemini CLI doesn't have the same exciting dev adoption of a Claude Code, many of us are quietly filling our systems with calls to Gemini!
Google owns many of the internet's greatest properties, enjoys insane distribution across the greatest business model of all time, and has vertical integration into their own cloud and hardware stack. They can afford to counterposition Gemini.
Someday, subsidized tokens will come to an end. And Google might give us an incredible, affordable AI workhorse, at economics that only their unique business can provide.
