H

Justin Heath

I design how humans and AI agents build software together.

Twenty-five years across .NET stacks, usually where the process is broken, manual, or both. Now focused on cognitive architecture and agentic workflows — understanding how people actually think, then building systems that fit.

Portrait of Justin Heath

What I'm Working On

  • Ideas — Cognitive Architecture & Agentic Workflows

    Essays on designing AI systems around how people actually think. Cognitive fit, specification literacy, agent architecture, and lessons from building an auto-healing dispatch system.

  • The Discovery Journal

    A guided self-examination tool for discovering your cognitive architecture. Interactive web app, browser-native, no backend.

  • Family Coordination App

    Meal planning to recipes to shopping lists. Built for my actual household with Blazor, .NET 8, PostgreSQL, and Docker. GitHub

  • Claude Code Plugin

    Custom configuration tuned for .NET, C#, and PowerShell workflows so AI assistance fits real production constraints. GitHub

  • Schedule I Mod

    MelonLoader mod for Schedule I with C# support for both Mono and IL2CPP runtimes. GitHub

Visual Work / Generated Art

AI-generated, 2026

My automated workflows generate images from task context. I also have my assistant mark milestones with special art tied to the work itself.

Writing / Thinking

Short versions here. Longer essays at ideas.heathdev.me.

Friction as Telemetry

Most productivity advice assumes friction is a character flaw. After twenty years of failed systems, I stopped optimizing the system and profiled the operator instead. The real tax wasn't inefficiency — it was misalignment. Friction isn't always resistance. Sometimes it's telemetry.

Specification Is the New Literacy

When building is free, the bottleneck is knowing what to build. AI fills ambiguity with plausible-looking software that compiles and has nothing to do with what the customer needs. The skill that matters now is describing what you want precisely enough that a machine builds it correctly.

Read the full essay →

How Your Mind Actually Works

Most design asks "what do you want?" — the wrong question. The right question is "how does your mind actually move?" I treated my own brain like a poorly-documented legacy system and ran a structured analysis. The highest-leverage act in building personal software is discovering how the person using it actually thinks.

Read the full essay →

You Don't Trust — You Instrument

When agents write your code, the code becomes opaque. You define scenarios outside the codebase, let the agent build, then evaluate behavior against those scenarios. The critical principle: the thing being validated cannot also control the validation criteria. Your role shifts from code reviewer to scenario designer.

The Expertise Paradox

Deep implementation expertise can be a liability in AI-augmented work. Generalists often adopt AI faster because their native workflow is already "I know what this should do, I'll look up the how." The expert's identity is forged around implementation — redirecting it to specification and evaluation is the necessary transition.

Read the full essay →

Externalized Intent

If it only exists in the code, it doesn't exist. Code captures what and how, but intent — the why — evaporates unless deliberately externalized. Documentation, tests, and visualization each serve a different cognitive moment. Without all three, every pause becomes a dig site. With them, every pause is resumable.

Background

  • Started in a hospital basement in 2000, routing calls through a switchboard database. Twenty-five years later, I still end up in the same kind of work: systems that should talk to each other but don’t, and processes running on patience instead of automation.
  • Eight years at Horizon Hobby, from support to building their B2B ordering platform and bridging .NET systems to IBM mainframes. That’s where I learned the interesting problems are usually at the seams.
  • Thirteen years at Volition, the studio behind Saints Row and Red Faction. I led IT development across HRIS, payroll automation, SharePoint migrations, and internal tools, and cut HR payroll processing time in half. The studio closed in August 2023.
  • Now at Veson Nautical, building analytics platforms with hundreds of structured fields per document, real-time dashboards for fleet-scale reporting, and pipelines that make compliance workflows survivable. I’m also running a governed AI-assisted development environment with specialized agents and verification frameworks.
  • The constant: find the manual, fragile thing held together by institutional knowledge, then replace the fragility with a system that lasts.

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