Hi, I’m Mike.

Bigfork is a small town where the Swan River meets Flathead Lake. It’s a good place to build things with long attention: big water, slow winters, a main street full of the kind of small operations I like building for.

The thing I’m proudest of is HEARDDD, a restaurant operations platform that a real bar & grill runs on every day — recipes, scheduling, inventory, checklists — with an AI agent that works the night shift: it reads the day’s data, investigates what looks off, and leaves proposals for a manager to approve or dismiss over morning coffee. I also built ArcadeLab, a publishing platform where kids ship games they build with AI; Riverbeta, a river-forecasting site for Montana whitewater; and claude-engram, an open-source memory system for LLMs that treats forgetting as a feature.

How I work is most of the story. I build with AI agents as collaborators — they write code alongside me, and I design systems where they do real work under human supervision. Everything I make ships to production and gets used by people who don’t care how it was built, which keeps me honest. And I hold one line everywhere: automation proposes, a human decides. The agent never holds the pen.

Before all this I was a software engineer building for the web — long enough to have shipped things in several eras of it. These days I build agentic systems for real businesses, and I take on one consulting engagement at a time.

If there’s a thread through everything here, it’s working systems over demos. A thing that runs every night for a year teaches you more than ten prototypes — and the leftover curiosity goes into the Lab.