I'm Ian, a software engineer bridging the last mile from it works to it ships. I help engineers and teams ship AI-generated code that's production-grade: the harnesses, charters, guardrails, and workflows that make AI-generated changes safe to merge. I teach all of it on Fulcorum and in Harness Engineering.
Highest-leverage AI wins for engineering teams. No scattered experiments, durable workflows.
Charters, guardrails, and audits, the scaffolding that carries AI changes from “it works” to “it ships.”
Backends, frontends, infra, and everything in between. Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, the whole stack.
Currently
On-demand video courses that help engineers and teams ship AI-generated code that's production-grade: the harnesses, charters, and workflows that carry a change from prototype to production.
About
I'm a passionate software engineer building software teams can actually change. I love solving complex problems, expanding my skills, and embracing the remote work lifestyle.
Lately, most of my work sits at the intersection of engineering and AI. I help engineers and teams ship AI-generated code that's production-grade, focusing on the highest-leverage wins rather than scattered experiments, and I teach that work through Fulcorum's video courses and my book. My philosophy is simple: AI writes the code; humans and harnesses make it production-grade.
My core expertise is in web applications: Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and Go. I work across the entire stack, backend APIs, frontend interfaces, testing frameworks, databases, job queues, web servers, Linux systems, cloud services, containers, orchestration, and Bash. I also author Ruby gems that simplify development and promote clean architecture.
My approach to work is thoughtful and people-centered. I enjoy collaborating with teams to deliver real value, using a cordial and consensus-driven leadership style, organizing activities, fostering cooperation, and building strategies that lead to positive, sustainable outcomes.
A working set of tools, sharpened over years of shipping.
Projects
The projects I care most about, open source, focused on the workflows and guardrails that turn AI-generated changes into software teams can trust.
Ruby Gems
A handful of Ruby gems I've written to simplify development and promote clean architecture, a task runner, a static site generator, and a web framework. No AI, just craft.
Resources
Long-form breakdowns of real systems, drawn from working code, with the domain specifics stripped out. Structure, thresholds, and control flow unchanged.
Five worked examples of agent guardrails, ascending from a single deny-list entry to a self-measuring delivery loop that writes rules back into its own charter.
Building a coding agent of your own. One rule followed up five mount points in LangChain, LangGraph, and deepagents: the predicate never changes, only where it lives.
Companion repo: github.com/tacoda/fulcorum-harness-promotion
Anatomy of a lights-on factory: gates before an action, provenance during it, one model dependency, and a durable queue holding the whole thing together.
A coding agent with the coding removed. Strip the builtin tools, replace the system prompt, register domain tools, and serve it: read-only SQL analytics for people who don't write SQL.
Companion repo: github.com/tacoda/pi-harness-sql-analytics
The harness is the graph, not the agent. Six worker nodes over a durable queue turn a topic into a briefing, with exactly one agent loop in the whole system.
Companion repo: github.com/tacoda/iii-concept-expander
The full slide deck. You can't flatten the signal, only narrow the band, and the agent amplifies whatever discipline it finds. Charter, guardrails, orchestration, audit trail.
A one-hour lab on the structured refusal to skip comprehension. Green tests, a quietly overcharged customer, and the two loops a charter is built from.
Seed repo: github.com/tacoda/fulcorum-junior-to-senior-workshop
Don't merge a change you can't explain. One law, four claims, four levels, and a merge bar a team can adopt in an afternoon. Forkable, CC BY.
Spec repo: github.com/tacoda/fulcorum-comprehension-standard
The junior reviews the agent, the senior reviews the review. Thirty minutes a week, one card, seven ways agent code is plausible and wrong.
Diffs repo: github.com/tacoda/fulcorum-reverse-review
A leader-facing deck on the seniority pipeline. Cutting junior intake looks free for six years, which is exactly what makes it the one move you can't take back.