Hey, I'm Tom
CTO and cofounder at Autonoma. I love building things and writing about it. AI enthusiast, ex-Googler, and forever curious.
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Latest Post
The Inevitable Death of Anthropic and OpenAI
AI will converge to local machines and that's a good thing for everyone, except for OpenAI, Anthropic and their investors.
Moodboard
What I'm stealing.
Designs, photos, and frames I keep coming back to.
Library
What I'm reading.
A handful of books I'd press into your hands. Filter by your role and stage to see what's worth reading right now.
Writing
What I'm thinking.
Long-form notes on building, engineering, and whatever else has been on my mind.
The Inevitable Death of Anthropic and OpenAI
AI will converge to local machines and that's a good thing for everyone, except for OpenAI, Anthropic and their investors.
OOP Won. You Just Don't Work on Hard Problems.
Before you tell me about the Uncle Bob altar in my bedroom, hear me out. I've spent my career building real-time video engines, AI agents, and stateful workflows. Here's why OOP keeps winning.
I Interviewed 200+ Engineers. Coding Challenges Are Still the Best Way to Hire.
After hiring at Google and building the founding team at Autonoma, here's what I learned about finding top 1% engineers, why simple problems reveal everything, and the unexpected things I discovered along the way.
18 Months of Code, Gone. Here's What We Learned.
We developed this product for over 1.5 years, closed clients left right and center, and now we're throwing everything away. Here's why, what we learned, and what we chose instead.
OpenAI Acquired OpenClaw
OpenAI didn't buy the project. They hired the person. And honestly, that's worse. The open-source assistant with 200k GitHub stars just got a foundation as a parting gift.
OpenClaw: The Best Skills for Your AI Setup (And the Ones You Can Skip)
87,000 skills and no way to tell which ones are good. Here's what actually changed how I work, what's noise, and why companies should start shipping skills like they ship SDKs.
What a Dotcom Survivor Taught Me About Not Dying in AI
Ben Horowitz's 'The Hard Thing About Hard Things' hits different when you're building an AI startup. Here's what I learned about wartime, pivots, and the 6-week test.
How to properly do max parallelism in TypeScript.
This is the solution to a question I usually ask on interviews. I decided to write a solution since I usually don't like the answers candidates give me.