§ 00 · From inside the building

Most AI advice is bullshit.
Here’s what actually ships.

Hi, I’m Zack 👋

I’m an AI engineer on the Applied AI team at WorkOS — we power authentication for OpenAI, Cursor, and a lot of the labs you’ve heard of. Fifteen years of web engineering before that. I help with the AI enablement function for our whole org: internal tooling, workshops, harnesses for teammates, helping everyone level up. I write down what I learn.

The Modern Coding letter5,000+ engineers
Dispatches from the edge of applied AI.

What lands in your inbox: what I’m building, what I’m learning, the tools I’d actually pay for, and the occasional workshop or tutorial. Names named, vendors graded, evals included.

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14yrs
Shipping software
5,000+
Newsletter readers
184wpm
Voice-coding velocity
21yrs
Writing online
Featured project
Premium · $149Shipping

Build a chatbot that actually knows your shit.

End-to-end RAG with Pinecone, the Vercel AI SDK, and Next.js 15. No hallucinations. No magic. A production harness you can hand to your team and they'll still understand it in six months.

Runtime
Node 20
Vector DB
Pinecone
Eval
Ragas++
~/zackproser.com — index
zp@work ~ $ ls -lh ./content
drwx writing/ 218 essays "modern-coding"
drwx builds/ 37 projects "rag, tools, tuis"
drwx videos/ 24 screencasts "long-form"
drwx workshops/ 6 decks "cowork, claude"
zp@work ~ $ cat ./status.json
{ "current": "applied-ai @ workos", "open_to": ["workshops", "retainers"], "wpm": 184 }
zp@work ~ $