Learning a Meaningless Signal
A few examples teach a model what a random vector in its activations means.
Open experimentPurpose-driven AI engineer and founding-stage builder with 20+ years of experience delivering production software end to end. Currently building AI-powered civic technology full time at Local Minutes, with deep expertise in agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and evaluation infrastructure. Previously the founding engineer at Fidian, a senior engineer at Observable, and a frontend engineer in Google Research, with experience spanning agent architecture, backend infrastructure, and polished, intuitive UX for complex systems.
Experiments
Reducing repetition in a model's writing
Let the model control its temperature when it wants to think divergently
Open experiment
Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-4B for Local Minutes
Fewer mistakes than Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, at 71% less cost.
Open experiment
Mapping with AlphaEarth
Finding forests and new developments in Vermont with satellite embeddings.
Open experiment
flow ui
Satisfying superfluous colorful swirls make managing my to-dos more fun.
Open experiment
Smoothed Fisheye
A fisheye effect for dense data with a smooth transition at the edge, preserving magnification at the focus.
Open experiment
Generative Art Study
An attempt to approximate the style of Holger Lippmann’s Recursive Tree X.
Open experimentExperience
- 2024 — presentNow
Local Minutes
Founder
Founder of a public-benefit company (Vermont L3C) whose free index makes public municipal records searchable through an AI-powered conversational interface, now covering essentially every Vermont municipality and millions of pages (localminutes.org). Responsible for every aspect of the project: data acquisition and the crawler, a RAG pipeline with embeddings in Pinecone, retrieval quality and evaluation infrastructure, speech-to-text with diarization for meeting audio, product design, UX, site reliability, monitoring, and per-query cost instrumentation. Also built Draft Minutes (draftminutes.org), which turns a meeting recording into draft minutes with every sentence click-to-verify against the source video, keeping the clerk in control of the record. Written in TypeScript and deployed using Vercel. Local Minutes helps municipal staff save time doing research, helps journalists dig into the history of issues, and helps citizens be engaged and informed in their local governments. See this writeup in Seven Days.
- Jan — Jun 2026
Fidian
Founding Member of Technical Staff
Founding engineer at a VC-backed startup (Pear VC, ENIAC VC) building an AI engineering platform for teams shipping agents. Built the original end-to-end version of the platform with broad ownership across the stack: authentication and multi-tenant identity on WorkOS, Claude Agent SDK integration including session forking and checkpointing architecture, git worktree based filesystem isolation, and observability with LangFuse and OpenTelemetry. Implemented the chat agent UI over websockets, with custom tool use components and a canvas visualizing proposed code changes and eval run results. Worked closely with both co-founders on the first version of the agent improvement system. Also responsible for frontend, UX, and branding work in collaboration with the Mission Objective agency.
- Jan — Aug 2024
Unity
Staff Software Engineer
Worked within the AI organization on Muse Chat, a Vercel hosted Next.js app written in TypeScript. Worked on the Unity Editor to contribute to the Muse Platform, written in C#. Left Unity in order to start Local Minutes.
- 2020 — 2023
Observable
Senior Software Engineer
Worked on many features for the Observable Notebook Editor which is written in TypeScript and uses React (Next.js). Worked closely with Mike Bostock on several projects, including the Observable runtime and standard library. A go-to person for untangling tricky TypeScript issues. The sole developer for Version Locking and TypeScript-powered Editor Hints, which brought the TypeScript Language Server into the browser. Conceived and then implemented (with Mike Bostock) the underlying architecture for Cell Modes. Contributor to Observable Plot. Public notebooks: observablehq.com/@duaneatat
- 2015 — 2020
Cisco Tetration
Principal Engineer
Network monitoring, segmentation, and workload security. 20th employee (now 150 employees), designed and implemented the most critical and widely-used components in the UI. Responsible for many technical solutions that enabled features that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. Developed a novel technique for performing uniform random sampling from a distributed Druid timeseries database. Developed a query parser using the Shunting-Yard algorithm that enabled the expression of complex queries involving conjunctions and parenthesis in the UI. Implemented and open-sourced a smoothed-fisheye function for use in visualizations of dense graphs. Founded and led the UX team. Balanced individual contributions and management. Work extensively in d3 and AngularJS.
- 2012 — 2014
Google Research
Web Developer
Started the Front-end Research team with one other person in Google Research which was lacking a Front-end perspective. Applied data analysis to gain a better understanding of how users use applications and challenge best practices. Designed and implemented the YouTube Tweaks project which optimized CSS across languages for an increased click-through on YouTube related videos. Worked extensively in d3.
More experience
- 2014 — 2015
Bitlogica
Director, Front-end Development
Cofounder of an accelerator with 20 employees (local and remote). Worked directly with Mark Pincus (Zynga), Eric Greenberg (Wrap.co), and Andrew McCallom (Facebook, Philo) to bootstrap their projects (SmartMail, Wrap.co, and Philo respectively). Worked extensively in React.
- 2010 — 2012
Xtranormal
Lead Front-end Developer
Responsible for a complete rewrite of the core technology, MovieMaker, which was flash, in HTML5. Go-to person for help with obscure browser quirks and bugs. Many amusing viral videos were produced using this app.
- 2009 — 2010
Cisco Pure Digital
Front-end Developer
Significantly optimized the javascript on flipshare.com. Set coding standards and maintained a wiki of best practices for CSS, Javascript, jQuery. Mentored and raised the general awareness of clean and efficient code.
- 2008 — 2009
Technorati
Front-end Developer
Worked with an inhouse produced php framework. Suggested google adwords placements for incremental, evergreen revenue.
- 2007 — 2008
IAC Search & Media
Front-end Producer
Was front-end lead producer for the site IWON.com. Implemented the site in Prototype & Scriptaculous, then rewrote it in jQuery.
- 2005 — 2007
LiveTechnology
Front-end Developer
Mentored other developers in JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, and AJAX, interviewed potential hires, and trained developers from companies who were licensing LiveTechnology's software. Developed an inhouse JavaScript framework.
About me
The thread through my work is using data to help people understand something complicated and make a decision about it. That was true of front-end research at Google, the notebook editor at Observable, and network-security visualization at Cisco. In 2024 I left Unity to start Local Minutes because I could see where AI was heading, and I wanted to use it on problems close to home.
Home is Essex, Vermont, where I’m the clerk of the Conservation and Trails Committee. So I write minutes as well as the software that searches and drafts them, which keeps me honest about what a clerk actually needs.
I was a Navy kid, grew up in California, and moved a lot on the way to Vermont. Away from the screen: winter running whenever the roads aren’t iced over, fingerstyle guitar on a nylon-string, a large bookcase I built and am still proud of, and two kids, five and eight.