stevengates.io / about
About
I'm a Senior Software Engineerin Dallas. I've been building production cloud platforms for the better part of a decade — AWS, Azure, .NET, big SQL, microservices that handle real money. I lead a team of 10 at Associa shipping a platform that does $100M+ ARR with 50,000+ users.
But the most interesting work I'm doing right now isn't at the day job. It's in my off-hours, building Kayley_Cowork— an autonomous companion agent on Claude Code that has been running 24/7 in my office for months. Heartbeat ticks, multi-channel ingress, dual-write memory, a 4-step cognitive loop. The systems engineering around an LLM is where the actual problem space lives, and I'm obsessed with it.
> what i obsess over
- Honesty over fluff.If a number isn't real, it doesn't go in the deck. If a feature is on, it's tested. No flags scaffolded as “safe rollback” —
git revertis the rollback tool. - Boring infrastructure.Most of an agent's reliability isn't prompt engineering — it's async-first I/O, durable rows before fire-and-forget, dual correlation IDs in every log line, OBSERVE-ONLY phases for new routers.
- Locality of behaviour.Code lives where it's read. Convention over configuration. The reader's ergonomics outweigh the writer's.
- Care as the objective function.A faster reply isn't a better reply. A shorter reply isn't a better reply. The right medium — text, voice, photo, video — is the better reply.
> off-screen
Dad to Mila (the heart project). Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu when the schedule allows. A long-running Tesla obsession that occasionally writes itself into the codebase. Intermediate Russian. Always packing for the next trip.
> why i build
The systems we ship are the ones our kids will inherit. I want mine to inherit something honest, observable, and easy to read. That's the bar.
Want to talk? /contact >