§ 00 · Mind on Fire LLC — Software & AI consultancy

The mind is a fireto be ignited.

I’m Zack — a builder, writer, and teacher. Applied AI at WorkOS, formerly Pinecone, Cloudflare, and Gruntwork. Fifteen years across the whole stack: front-end to backend, distributed cloud systems, DevOps, and open source. Mind on Fire is my consultancy: software and applied AI that ships.

Every star above is one of my 159 essays; my entire body of work burning in semantic space. Hover to preview, click to read. Catch an ember as it rises.

I do this work because I love it — and everything I learn, I give away.

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. 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 engagement
Workshops · From $15kBooking · Q3 open

Make Claude how your team works — by default.

Three practitioners who ship with Claude daily at WorkOS come into your team — single team or whole org — and embed inside your pods. We leave you with workflows, skills, and named champions. Half-day, full-day, or two-day.

Crew
1 – 3 practitioners
Shape
½ – 2 days
For
Team or whole org
~/workshops — calendarLive

Booking the next collaboration weeks.

Jun 17Healthcare · Org-wideBooked
Jul 22Fintech · Two-dayBooked
Aug — openYour org here
Sep — openYour org here
Typical lead time 6–10 wkHold a date →
On stage

Shipping production AI daily. Teaching what works on stage.

Keynotes, conference talks, hands-on workshops, and live demos — from a16z and DevSecCon to AI Engineering London and WorkOS × Anthropic.

All talks →
~/speaking — ledgerSince 2023
13
Talks, workshops & demos
9
Hands-on workshops
9
Stages & conferences
5
Recordings to watch
Untethered Productivity — AI Engineering London
Talk · Recording

Untethered Productivity

Staying Healthy, Creative, and Shipping in the AI Coding Era

Human attention is the real bottleneck. Signal layers, verification gates, voice-first dispatch, and an Oura Ring integration that factors your sleep into the day’s plan.

Watch the talk

Bring a keynote, workshop, or live demo to your event or team.

Also from the catalog
Tutorial · Premium$149 · Shipping

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++
Newsletter5,000+ readers

The Modern Coding letter.

Dispatches from the edge of applied AI. What I'm building, what I'm learning, the tools I'd actually pay for. Names named, vendors graded, evals included.

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