I asked him to set the résumé aside and just answer. What came back was six short pieces — on solitude, on what is not code, on what is harder than code, on two Balkans and one notebook, on what the control is for, and on why the human still has to keep kicking the machine.
№ 001 · Sovereignty After Midnight
Forget the resume for a moment. When are you most yourself in a day — what are you doing, where, with whom?
It always begins after midnight, or just before the first light — when every layer of the day's noise has finally been stripped out and there is only one person awake in the room. That hour is not for sentiment, and it is not rest. It is the dry, deliberate work of thinking, of re-architecting myself.
Lately I run that work with borrowed instruments — Internal Family Systems, Vygotsky's private speech — frameworks built to study other people, turned inward. Anxiety, sloth, raw energy: none of them are allowed to remain feelings. They are decomposed into objects, given names and roles, and arranged — as logical weapons for my business and my survival — in an architecture I can reason about. Emotion is kept outside the diagram on purpose. In that perfect isolation — disassembling and reassembling myself like a system that finally agrees to be inspected — what I feel is not catharsis. It is sovereignty. That is when I am most myself.
Lately the same instrument has begun to leave the room. Grimoire — a platform I built for publishing novels — went live, and I posted my own novel on it. Drawings followed. There is another project I have not yet mentioned to anyone, a Web · Server · iOS triple-platform build running in parallel. The point is this: that late-night work — examining myself with Internal Family Systems, with Vygotsky's private speech, decomposing emotion into objects — has begun producing creative work I never could have predicted.
№ 002 · Outside the Diagram
Beyond the code, who are you?
I draw, I write verse, I write prose. I can sketch simple characters by hand. In the very first wave of Nanobanana, even the most innocent or scholarly subject came back with “cannot, due to the safety rules,” so I went and took a digital drawing class — convinced that the basic literacy of drawing belonged with the human, not the model. Now, when an idea is at the proof-of-concept stage or fully formed, I draw with Nanobanana. The prompts I keep are filed in two buckets. The classical references are Caravaggio, Francis Bacon, Goya, chiaroscuro, impasto. The modern references are cel-shading, webtoon, lo-fi 80s and 90s Japanese manga, ukiyo-e.
For verse, I write short jisei — the death poems — and one of mine sits as chapter ten of a Codex I keep. The Codex is a thick stack of Google Keep files where I sort out the existential notions, the worldviews, and the bits of philosophy I can otherwise never finish thinking through.
For prose, the serial runs on Grimoire — my own project. It started from the hypothesis that the deer in the old fairy tales might not have been ordinary deer at all. The protagonist crosses the flow of time forward or backward at will, picks up the scent of want in the people of those tales and in the modern living, and gives them a small push from behind so they unravel or render themselves absurd. He enjoys watching the process itself.
In the era of vibe coding, does technology still mean what it once did. The question stayed with me. So I started seriously reaching outside technology too. I did consider whether to put the characters I had designed up for sale on Marpple Shop or Instagram — that one I have not gotten to yet, which is a regret.
№ 003 · Coding Was the Harder Thing
Indulge the obvious one — the hardest stretch of your life.
Coding was the harder thing. The day I came back from the Philippines and decided to become a developer, I discovered my own family had been forging contracts in my name. I sat across from a lawyer and answered questions like a suspect. From the moment I understood what had happened to the moment I cut them off completely, two hours had passed.
2025 was less a record-setting hardship than something that needs a different framing. If I had to put it in an analogy: it was closer to debating, at the Chernobyl reactor, how many hours a human can stand beside the densely concentrated radiation block without protective gear. The accountant who watched me from her desk in the office said it. “You see the office mood. The former staff who took a fistful of sleeping pills and psychiatric meds and burned out — you know it. If you don’t want to lose your mind, ride a motorcycle. There are plenty of people around here who almost burned out and got their lives back on the bike.”
October 2025 — three thousand kilometers on the motorcycle through Gangwon, including a tourist’s car that nearly killed me. November 2025 — another three thousand through Jeolla and Gyeongsang, ending with a nonstop ride from Mokpo to Seoul, straight home. December 2025 — sliding out in a snowstorm at Hongdae station, and walking away from it. The full perimeter loop of Korea is about two thousand five hundred kilometers. In two months, I rode it twice over.
Sitting on the road after that December 2025 slide, replaying the whole stretch end to end, I laughed long and hard. “Ah,” I thought, “the Reaper decided it was not yet my time and kicked me back.” That was how I took it.
I slept wherever I could lie down. I ate one meal a day, sometimes none. I dropped laundry at a neighborhood cleaner and bought myself a coffee while it ran. Riding a country road with only moonlight on it has a charm of its own. But before any long ride, the bike went through a full inspection at a certified service center. The thing I hate most is the infinite-positivism that uses romance as cover to ignore the risk of a real accident.
№ 004 · The Mission Song
John le Carré has a novel about an interpreter — a translator's life that arrives at multiple registers of truth. You said you did simultaneous interpretation at work. Sounds like it wasn't simultaneous interpretation in the technical sense.
The interpreting did not start there. Before I was a developer, I was a journalist. I covered industrial automation, fitness, and solar energy — writing articles in those fields — and at trade shows I did simultaneous interpretation. I also interviewed people from abroad in English. One was a director from the headquarters of a German equipment company; another was a Russian who came as a visitor to a trade show the magazine had organized.
Around 2018. The company was GRAP — an enterprise messenger. I worked alongside one person for a little over a year. A Slovenian backend CTO. He was young but had been coding seriously since before he was old enough to vote, so the years stacked up to something close to two decades. Before he joined, there had briefly been a Mexican web and server engineer. Before I joined, I was told there had been a Japanese iOS developer too. The company itself sold a messenger, so we didn't use Slack. We used the messenger we built, on ourselves. Ninety-nine percent offline.
When the backend and the iOS engineer talked to each other, we just spoke English. The trouble was the people next to us. The PC Windows client developer, the other backend engineers — their English wasn't going to carry the conversation. So I stood in with a notebook. The way Korean university students of Russian literature get pulled into rooms when a Russian ambassador visits Seoul, simultaneously translating between a Korean official and the visiting party — that's roughly the shape of it. Every conversation in the room — small talk, spec negotiations, live incident response — went through my notebook and out the other side.
Neither of us was a native English speaker. Which is exactly why it worked. We both salted technical words into our English sentences and the intent landed without trouble. There was a small grammar gap between someone from the Balkans and someone from far-east Asia: have where it should have been has, are or have following everyone where it should have been is or has. Both of us did it, both of us caught it, both of us let it pass. That was the year I understood what lingua franca actually means.
He told me about his family one evening. His grandfather had been a director inside the UDBA — the intelligence service of the old Yugoslavia. The Korean equivalent would be a director of the NIS, or close to a CIA director. In the early 1990s, when the Balkans were about to come apart, the family obtained classified information ahead of the breakup and got out before the war reached them. He was a descendant of that exit. The young veteran who had been writing code since before he was legally allowed to — there was an instinct from a generation of intelligence work standing behind that code.
I thought of someone else while he talked. Early 2010s, when I was studying in Canada, my landlady was a woman from the same region. She had taught English literature at a Yugoslavian university. She had lived through the siege of Sarajevo. When she described what happens to a body hit by a mortar shell, she wasn't reaching for a metaphor — she had seen it. The helplessness of being inside a city that a sniper on the ridge has decided to look at — she had carried that. The Tito years. The Stalin years. The fact that in a communist state, a knock at the door in the middle of the night meant the next day a person was simply no longer in the world. She had carried all of it. The year I came back to Korea, 2012, the last thing she said to me was this: "Whatever you do, online or in public, say only the minimum. I have been through the Stalin era, the Tito era, the war years. A person disappears from the world in a single moment."
Two people from the same region of the Balkans. One could never forget the smell of gunpowder — a literature professor. One escaped, turned nomad, and drifted all the way to Korea — a veteran developer. The two of them met inside me. I hadn't engineered the coincidence. What that year did teach me was this — that the phrase global collaboration was not a slogan inside a Korean office; that even a person who likes solitude long enough to call themselves contemplative can communicate just fine, provided someone worth communicating with is in the room.
№ 005 · Dominate or Be Dominated
The night work, the system disassembly, the two-hour cutoff — these are all marks of someone who has chosen to hold the controls. So: what is the control for? Three to five years out — what do you intend to use it to build?
The media industry I started in handed out ashtrays and slaps as a matter of course. The Philippines, where I worked next, did not run on law or common sense. Then a family willing to betray me for ten million won, and a long line of incidents after that — all of them sitting outside the law and outside what most people would call sense. After moving through enough of that, one thing becomes clear.
If I cannot dominate this world, the world will dominate me. If I cannot protect myself, I collapse in front of it.
There is a benefit to going through enough of what sits outside common sense. You develop the eye to take apart, with precision, whatever someone swears is flawless — and to break it. And you come to understand why dominance has to be forced onto the source code, why the system has to be leashed so it behaves only the way you have predicted. At my last shop, the colleagues called me the QA killer. The official title was mobile engineer. The unofficial role — never assigned, never possible to take away — was to read what the web developers built and find, inside thirty minutes and usually much faster, what was broken in it. Bugs, malfunctions, wrong assignments, a frontend reading the wrong field. I did a fair amount of QA on the code of freelance Android engineers too; a few of those would have gone out and turned genuinely dangerous if I had not caught them. A senior web developer said he had never seen anyone QA this hard. I do not know if he meant it as a compliment. The instinct is the same one — outside the law and outside common sense, if you do not protect yourself, you collapse.
The method is simple. I read someone else's code as if I were the one most likely to have introduced the bug. If the value changes here, it travels through the API to the database — and back through the API to the web. At every point in that flow, was the type really being verified? Some book somewhere said you should not depend on what is most likely to change — so why is this depending on the volatile UI rather than on the model? Is this implementation honoring the principle of responsibility? This component is meant to take only numeric values — what happens when the user pastes something else from the keyboard? That is QA. That is also the act of forcing my dominance onto the source code. The questions are mine. Whatever sticks out against that dominance, I grind down, press flat, or strip out and rebuild.
№ 006 · Rage Against the Machine
RATM. You wrote those four letters yourself when I asked how you actually work with the machine. Why that phrase, for this?
An AI tilts toward not naming its own defects. Throw a single word at it and it bends every observation to fit that word; lay down a thousand-line specification and it skips the middle entirely. The implication is plain — the machine has to be kicked, continuously, before it listens.
Some will say chat alone is enough; the machines today are clever, the argument goes. I see it differently. The machine starts listening only when it has been slapped with documents, when scripts, hard-coded permission constraints, and a forced log of its own mistakes that it has to face again every session are stacked around it. You have to build the machine so that it can slap itself — that, I think, is what harness engineering is. And that is why I borrowed the title of this section from Rage Against the Machine.
I do not write the code. I stand next to the machine that writes it, watching to make sure it does the work right. That is what I mean by Rage Against the Machine — why I keep kicking the machine and watching to make sure it stays in line.
As I have already said: click-business does not exist, click-coding does not exist. The lecture I give names specific cases. In the United States and across Latin America, there are already vibe-coded businesses that were breached in their first week and shut down by the second. The dream that a human will line-by-line review and debug tens of thousands of machine-written lines is a beautiful dream that does not survive the calendar.
So I write a great many documents. I think about harness engineering. I think about agents. I make the devil's advocate and the red team run before every commit. The job of watching the machine is not done by the human directly. It is done by a system the human built on top of the machine.
"Oh, the AI is doing pretty well these days. I guess that makes me a founder, then." — that is infinite-positivism. I do not know how to do that. The only thing I know how to do is think, one more time, about how to kick the machine more efficiently. The machine has read every book on design and every book on engineering ever written. It still does not know what is beautiful, and it still does not know what opens a wallet. That is why the human is required — required — to keep producing the kind of insane ideas the machine would not dare imagine.
Read this interview at sass.studio.