About
Robert Drake
I build software that has to work in the place it's used, not just on the machine it was written on. Full-stack across web and iOS, on the web since the early 2000s, currently pointed at getting AI systems into production where they actually change a number.
The short version
I've been building for the web since the early 2000s — long enough to have watched several waves of technology arrive as inevitable and leave as unremarkable. The pattern that repeats is that the interesting problem is never the technology. It's the distance between the technology and somebody's actual job.
That's the distance I work in. It's why I ended up doing forward deployed work rather than model work: I'd rather sit with the person whose Tuesday is ruined by a process and fix that, than shave a point off a benchmark.
I write Swift and SwiftUI, and TypeScript across the stack. FalconryLab is an iOS product I built for a niche I know well, which involved exactly the embedding-and-learning motion I get paid for elsewhere. Code lives on GitHub.
The falconry
I'm a falconer. I flew a red-tailed hawk named Suzy for three years, and I have a Brittany called Hank who is better at his job than I am at mine.
I bring it up because it turns out to be the same discipline. A falconer weighs the bird every single day before deciding whether to fly her, because a hawk half an ounce heavy will take the food and leave, and a hawk half an ounce light shouldn't be flying at all. You do not get to skip the measurement because yesterday went well. You do not grant more freedom than the data supports.
That is evals and graduated autonomy, several centuries early. It is also why I find the current fashion for shipping agents on vibes slightly funny.
Elsewhere
The rest of it.
Outside work I'm usually outside — hiking, birding, or somewhere on a trail with Hank and a camera. I'm in Michigan, on US Eastern time.
This domain used to be a hand-built retro homepage — a procedural canvas sky, a guestbook, twelve easter eggs, and about four thousand lines of Canvas 2D written for no reason at all. It has been retired, but it is the honest answer to what I do when nobody is paying me.