I'm Nick, a software architect and lead AI engineer with 20+ years of shipping production systems and 8+ years of leading engineering teams — today in logistics and fulfillment automation. AI is part of my daily engineering work: coding agents do real implementation in my own projects, and at work I bring AI tools into my team — choosing them, training engineers and setting the rules for review. On my YouTube channel, Zero to MVP, I test AI coding agents, local LLMs and developer tools on real projects and real hardware, and show what actually holds up.
Latest videos
GridCore, a GPU scheduler I built, decides which local model runs, which waits and which gets unloaded — so interactive chat always comes first.
Six models from 5B to 35B on a mini PC with 32 GB of memory and no desktop GPU — with the measured speed of each and the ones I kept.
Where a local Qwen 3.8 holds up unsupervised and where it starts to drift — tested on real tasks, not benchmarks.
Things I've built
Products I designed, built and shipped myself. Texodus started as a model test on one of my Prompt Vault specs and grew into a Markdown editor for three platforms; it and Kivarion are built with coding agents working under written rules — here's how I split the work.
Recent notes
- Agents in the Background: No LangGraph, No LangChain Required
How I actually run agents that watch folders and websites: a long-lived process, plain trigger scripts, cron — and no LangGraph or LangChain.
- Claude Code Auto Mode: The "Allow" Button Was Never Protecting You
Anthropic's classifier blocks 89% of dangerous actions; humans approve almost everything. Why Auto Mode by default matters — and what it doesn't replace.
- Mirroring Your Repo Is Not a Backup Plan
GitHub Actions and Pages went down and the vendor lock-in argument came back. I mirror every repo to three hosts — and still could not cut a release.
Watch, read, support
Watch real products get built and shipped with AI — and take the workflows that survive.
One AI signal, one tool, one MVP idea — a practical 5-minute email. No hype, no link dumps.
The thoughts and observations that don't fit the newsletter — and the more personal videos that don't suit the channel.
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