montfort.dev

Build in public

José Villaseñor Montfort

I practiced law for years, built the first app to put Mexico City's earthquake alert on phones back in 2012, and spent the years in between bringing digital transformation to law firms. Today I runStrange Days Tech and I'm buildingStrayMark — governance and accountability for AI-assisted engineering.

Law degree, CS studies, and a long-standing suspicion that the interesting problems live between the two. This is where I write about building it — decisions, frictions, findings.

now → shipping StrayMark · essays below, no fixed cadence

Essays

The immaculate programmer

A reply on Hacker News said the best human programmers would never make the mistakes AI makes. We built an entire discipline — code review, linters, postmortems — on the premise that they do. On the asymmetry of scrutiny, and the programmer we never were.

I don't want an AI that needs me less

The industry sells AI by how little it needs you. I think that's backwards. The human in the loop was never the inefficiency we're so eager to remove — it was the foundation of trust.

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