Flash was capable, fast, and everywhere. Every project re-solved the same problems. Setup. State. Loading. Routing. Deep-linking. Every team’s stack was bespoke and brittle.
The bottleneck was never capability. It was the absence of shared discipline.
GAIA Flash codified the patterns worth keeping and made the rest unnecessary.
Claude is capable, fast, and everywhere. Every team re-solves the same problems. Prompt drift. Convention chaos. Tests skipped. Vibe-coded work that breaks in week two.
The bottleneck still isn’t capability. It’s the absence of discipline around Claude.
GAIA React codifies the patterns worth keeping. The AI has to follow them.
- 2024–2025
Principal Fullstack Engineer, Trek10
Led six engineers rebuilding a financial services platform for a top-tier management consulting client. Built a JSON-driven dashboard engine for non-engineers, improved the Python API layer, and modernized the codebase from React 15 to React 19.
- 2020–2023
Lead React Engineer, American Express
Built the internal dining concierge platform used by Amex teams worldwide. Led the mobile rebuild of Pocket Concierge for Japan.
- 2016–2017
Director of Engineering, PlayBrain
Architected a serverless multilingual publishing platform and a real-time esports tournament system. Hired and led the engineering team.
- 2012–2015
Founder, Plug DJ
Social music platform. 6M registered users, 1M monthly actives, 60K simultaneous connections. Raised $2.5M from Javelin Venture Partners. Acquired.
Every team using Claude right now is paying a tax: prompt drift, skipped tests, code the next engineer is afraid to touch. It’s the same tax Flash teams paid before GAIA Flash, and it compounds quietly until the only fix left is a rewrite.
GAIA stops the compounding: discipline built into the project itself, the way it was in GAIA Flash. I’ve done this before, at scale.
My goal hasn’t changed since then. Each person shipping the work of a team. Code the next engineer can build on.