I like to build things. Organizations, code, systems, clubs, whatever! Here’s a little list of recent stuff. But really, /now is likely more up-to-date (but maybe less structured).
AI Frameworks
I find that LLMs allow the fusion of philosophy and building. This brings me great joy.
Claude Desk — My home office. An open-source, extensible framework for intelligently using LLMs as your comms team, executive assistant, thought partner, coach, etc.
The Claude Bicycle — The template I use for every new engineering project. A framework for coordinating swarms of agents to work on tasks. Lots of stuff I’m proud of here: careful layering of bootup prompts, good structural separation, knowledge bases, hooks, async jobs. (First inspired by, and now porting changes to, the desk)
Lobster — I’m working on this with my buddy Drew. Independently reinventing OpenClaw (and its derivatives). Using smart engineering principles and assuming a one-click deploy to sandboxed servers as a default. I now feel the thrill of how building linux must have been in the early days. Amazingly fun. Quite educational. Addicting.
Tools and experiments
Qualified Self. Input everything you know about yourself. (Either personally or professionally, or both). Dump it all into a folder. Then well-structured, well-organized pipelines do qualitative ETL. Start with extracting facts, then synthesize patterns, then write huge reports about who you are, who you might be, and how to understand it.
Law Student Tracker. What if cold calling, attendance, and whiny students were NOT huge energy sucks? Automates it all for a law professor I happen to know. Uses Val Town!
My Voice — Training LLMs to write like me. This is surprisingly difficult. I’m importing concepts from rhetoric, logic, and computer science. (Nothing from computational linguistics yet, interestingly enough). Not yet open-sourced.
Swift Dictation — push a button on your mac. Talk. Let go — and what you said gets pasted in. Easy, simple. Fun.
Let’s Name Wombie — An early project. Trying to see how far I could push LLMs. (And how fancy I could get with statistics).
Where I’m writing:
- DataExpert — Series on data warehousing, starting with why SCDs are the wrong default (part 2). More coming.
- Sahar.io — The blog of this website. A mix of personal and everything else.
- Growth and What Comes Next — About (personal/professional and also organizational/platform) growth, theory of the internet, engineering, leadership — more of a professional space.
- Yenta — The newsletter for my matchmaking project. And a bit of a life update to friends along the way.
Ongoing:
I’m a sort of “ex-founder in residence” to a startup called Val Town. The official title is growth engineer. Unofficially — I’m an applied advisor with a mandate to fix anything that needs fixing, especially in growth. Super fun.
I’m also helping spin up a donor advising network in tech and democracy.
I still matchmake my friends to jobs, romance, and housing.
Also — being a dad!
Personal:
Sarah and I rock climb. We play a lot of Frosthaven and Gloomhaven. We host parties, and are especially interested in blending SF creativity, jewish coziness, NY eclecticness, and both parents and nonparents.
Mostly, though, we are raising a child.
To learn more:
See what I was up to in the past (an overview per year since 2011), what I’m up to now, or the blog.
See what I was up to in the past (an overview of my life per year since 2011), what I’m up to now, or the blog.