Rich Steinmetz · engineer & so many hats
Helping to build software products and communities since 2015
With love for a rotating cast of coding agents in the marketing industry, Rails and live events.
01 · The whole thing, compressed
Rich's life in one paragraph.
It is a lot of a TL;DR paragraph. Only press the seal if you got yourself a hot drink yet.
Vacuum-packed · press to declassify
TL;DR Helping product teams build software since 2015. Currently rotating Claude Code, Codex & Copilot models in Pi, Hermes and vanilla harnesses. Grew up with Java-JS-Python. Then Ruby. Rails. More JS. API. UX. DX. AX. Dug ML and terminals before AI was that cool. Marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship as a hobby. Meetup organizer online (e.g. Rails.Builders) and in-person (e.g. early Barcelona.rb). Minimum once-per-year conference lurker. Speaker with podcast experiments. Speaking German 🇩🇪, Russian 🇷🇺, English 🇺🇸, and Spanish 🇪🇸 fluently, but none particularly well. Serial blog killer 🔫 (RichStoneIO 2021-2025, datagoodie 2017-2019, pro poker player adventures 2011-2014). Ex-poker player. Ex-numismatic sales assistant. Video games, board games, card games, and football hobbyist. Enjoying thinking in odds & bets. Periodically building communities. Calisthenics noob 🤸♀️. Ice baths are cool. Raising some fun small people too!
02 · Contact
Send me a POST request
I'm always up for AI navigation discussions, career talks, Rails, agents, or a Grand idea you want a second opinion on. Rich responds within a day or a week, depending on the current load.
Lands in my ClickFunnels workspace, which is the software I help building during the day and where you will be subscribed to the Loop Labs newsletter.
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Drive with the Rails.Builders 🚂03 · A small experiment
Agent vs Operator.
In 2014 I stopped playing poker and after a year of doing a bunch of stuff I decided to study computer science despite my lifelong conviction that I can't be a programmer because I'm not great at math. At this point though, I believed I can do anything if I was able to have success in such a mathy area as poker. And also, if I was to become a super nerd, I would be able to build what I loved: Games. Now, I only learned about the intricacies of getting into game dev and then working a game developer schedule and their respective salaries in comparison to everything else in later semesters. But it's amazing to me that you can now ship a trivial game with a prompt. I'm not sure where the below one is going, but it's a start. Maybe not a start of my game dev career after 11 years of postponing it, but a little reminder of that little spark that led to something I have never imagined. It's now a little spark collection, my first Clauded end-to-end working game, one prompt and still WIP. :D
🎬 (as Claude understood its own creation from my super vague prompt) You are the operator. Against the agent. It has more throughput than you have hands. Push the loop to your side before it pushes it to its own. 🤷🍿
1 = bit · 8 = byte
bit → 1 mass, costs 9 buffer, moves fast · byte → 4 mass, costs 34 buffer, moves slow
heavier packet wins the collision and keeps the difference · buffer refills on its own
the agent speeds up the longer you take — it scales, you do not