Personal Manifesto

Engineering is a primitive form of biology. We do not understand biology yet, so we work with what we can. Software and hardware are separate today because we are not good enough yet. They will not stay separate.

What follows is the trajectory I see, the work I want to do inside it, and why I am starting where I am starting.

1. From design to growth

Right now, hardware iterates in months and software iterates in minutes. The bridge is shortening that gap until designing a part feels like writing a function. Engineers move up to systems work. GD&T persists as long as we are bound to subtractive and additive manufacturing. But only that long.

The endgame is not faster CAD. The endgame is going from a 3D model to a 3D object using biology. Seed to glass. The manufacturing process becomes a living process, and the things we build start to grow.

2. Custom manufacturing without the cage of GD&T

Today, to build a small thing you need a bigger thing. 3D printers, CNC machines, injection molds. All larger than the part they produce. This is counterintuitive: nature does not work this way. Nature grows.

When manufacturing can hit nominal dimensions every time, GD&T stops being a constraint and becomes a relic of the manufacturing era we left behind. That is custom manufacturing at scale.

3. Hardware as a living ecosystem

A human hand does not need maintenance. A robotic hand does. The difference is that a human hand is a living system, not a structure. Continuous self repair, distributed sensing, no central scheduler.

We cannot replicate this in machines because we have barely built anything based on swarm intelligence. The next layer of hardware is hardware that is its own ecosystem.

4. Biology's three problems: observability, deliverability, scalability

Observability. You cannot see what is happening inside your body at any given moment. We take snapshots and infer the rest.

Deliverability. We know the location of a tumor very accurately. We have no way to tell the immune system "go to X, Y, Z." So instead we bombard with xrays and radiation, which is just constructive interference plus collateral damage.

Scalability. Biology research is bound to human labor. This is addressable right now, without any new breakthroughs. It is one of the things I want to work on.

5. Editing the body within a lifetime

The interesting part is not controlling evolution across generations. It is editing yourself within a finite timeline. I want to climb a wall, so I change my skin to stick. I want to take a long flight, so I change my metabolism for the duration.

Getting there means first understanding how other organisms work and then translating that knowledge back to humans. When that loop closes, humans get an exponential evolution curve they have never had before.

6. Intelligence as emergence

Intelligence is not a human specialty. It is what emerges when enough complexity is connected. The current artificial neural network architecture may need exponentially more connections than biology to produce something we would recognize as real intelligence. But we are getting close. Scarily close.

7. Colonies and singletons

If you can connect units and form a collective intelligence, then a question opens up: is a human body a colony of organisms, or a single organism? My gut says colony. I have more questions than answers here, and I am watching the field carefully.

8. Why hardware first

The ultimate goal is to enable humanity to engineer biology so that we can survive interstellar travel. I want to go to faraway galaxies. I will not make that trip in this lifetime, and not with this body.

Hardware is the crucial first step. If I make hardware 100 to 1000x faster to design, everyone benefits. And I free decades of my own life, and of every engineer's life, for the biology work that comes after.

Engineers should become inventors again.

Last meaningful edit: 31 May 2026.