Hello, I'm Ben. I build products with LLMs and agents, and ship them on my own.
Software engineer and founder in Oakland. Seven years as a software engineer at E*TRADE, Nexon, and Apple. Now Bay82 Studio, where Jeni is on the App Store with about a hundred paying subscribers. In between, four years running a brokerage doing five million a year, where I sold to customers and then rebuilt the back office in software. Berkeley CS, Haas MBA 2027.
Work
Earlier Healify (2020 to 2022), a SaaS and mobile tool for psychotherapists and their patients, co-founded. It is closed.
Experience
Photographs
Reading
Books on the shelf, in no particular order.
About
I build AI products on my own at Bay82 Studio, mostly in Python, TypeScript, and Swift. Jeni is the one people use: a weight management app on the App Store, designed, built, and launched alone, with LLM features running in production. I work with agent tooling every day, and most of what I ship now is written alongside it.
I studied computer science at Berkeley and spent seven years as an engineer at E*TRADE, Nexon, and Apple, mostly building web apps, plus a few large front end migrations.
In 2021 I left Apple to help my father's shipping container business. I ran sales and operations for four years, and when people left and we couldn't replace them, I rebuilt their work in software. We couldn't turn the business around, and it closed in 2025. Those years are where most of what I know about customers comes from.
I'm finishing an MBA at Berkeley Haas. I live in Oakland. I read a lot, and I write here when something is worth writing down.