Portfolio
Zack
Forward-Deployed Engineering portfolio
Software that asks to be trusted eventually gets something wrong quietly. Everything here is built the other way: it proves itself, and when it can’t, it says so out loud.
Capabilities
Vaults that can prove they haven't rotted
Every long-running project keeps one file that is supposed to be the truth, and every one of them rots. I build source-of-truth vaults that carry their own verifier: each section is hashed, so a match proves that section unchanged — and a separate consistency proof against a manifest held elsewhere catches the harder case, an edit to a past entry that re-stamps itself clean.
Agent roles that survive long sessions
Setting an agent's role in the prompt works for ten minutes and fails at hour four. I build the role into the folder structure instead, so it comes from the contract file a stage loads rather than from anything the agent was told — with a routing table naming what a session may not load, and outputs that sit in a pending folder until a human moves them. The gate is folders, not flags, because a boolean can be set by the code that wants it set and a folder cannot move itself.
Rails that refuse instead of reporting
Written rules are an honor system, and I have the receipts: one audited session skipped a mandatory pre-flight every single time, then repeated two prohibitions it could quote back verbatim. So I stopped writing detectors and started writing code that runs before a tool call commits and can refuse it. In that same audit, the instruction was skipped completely and the gate that blocks was skipped zero times.
Wiring a new project in one command
Hand-wiring projects into shared standards produced half-wired projects and a registry nobody could trust. One command now births a project connected both ways: it pulls the shared rules by citation at session start, and its own records ride a daily patrol back. Wire-time proof rather than wire-time hope — every file pattern it registers is resolved against the real filesystem, and the spawn exits non-zero if one matches nothing.
Where this bites in a business
Two things a business is under pressure to do at once: adopt AI, and ship faster than it can carefully review. Both ask for trust on faith, and faith is where the quiet, expensive failures live — a stale paragraph acted on as current, a policy everyone can quote and nobody follows, a role that dissolves at hour four of a long session. The four capabilities above are one answer applied four ways: don’t ask to be trusted, prove it, and fail loudly when the proof isn’t there. A system that can prove its own claims is a system a stakeholder can bet on.