Ben Reed

I design and build software with a focus on clarity, ownership, and real-world use.

My background is in native iOS development, but my work now sits at the intersection of product thinking, architecture, and AI-assisted development. I don't just write code — I design systems that can evolve, scale, and be understood months or years later.

I use tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor heavily, but not in a “press a button and ship” way. They're useful for getting ideas into code quickly, but they still need direction, constraints, and someone making the calls. That's where most of the work is — defining the problem properly, setting boundaries, and making sure what comes out is something you'd actually want to maintain.

A big part of how I work is building structure around that process — reusable prompts, agent “skills”, and clear guardrails so the output is consistent and production-ready rather than throwaway. If anything, the whole “stay hungry, stay foolish” idea from Steve Jobs feels more relevant here than it probably should — AI makes it very easy to try things quickly, but also very easy to build a lot of nonsense if you're not paying attention.

I'm particularly interested in offline-first, privacy-focused applications and systems that give users ownership of their data. For personal projects, that's also a very deliberate choice — I'm not interested in maintaining backend stacks, user databases, or dealing with compliance and data overhead. I get enough of that in day-to-day work. I'd rather build things that are fast, local, and simple to run.

At a higher level, I care about building things properly: clean architecture over quick hacks, maintainability over novelty, and shipping useful software over chasing trends.