frantic.im
Alex Kotliarskyi
I’m a software engineer based in Seattle. I work at OpenAI on making GPUs do useful things. I like building products, obsessing over UX and little details, and connecting the dots. In the past I cofounded Secta AI, worked at Replit and Facebook building mobile apps, developer efficiency tools, React Native, Oculus and Messenger. I write about technology and side projects.
October 2026
Top Words
- story
- side
- project
- hacker
- cares
All posts (17)
Report #250012-22-N9 Subject: Carbon based intelligence form from Terra The Subject has been involved in the ancient software engineering for at least 20 Sol cycles. Attached is the observations log starting from the time T of the first contact. Phase 0. The Subject encounters early Conversational Silicon...
I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups (among other things). He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit. At the time I was a massive productivity nerd. I had a custom Vim setup with my own...
The 80/20 rule says that 80% value come from 20% effort. What if we apply the 80/20 rule to the first 80%? So 80% of 80% of value come from 20% of 20% of effort. Or 64% of the value come from 4% of the effort. Apply it again and you’ll get ~51% value from ~1% effort. Which is ballpark close to “Dimidium facti, qui...
We just published a blog post about Symphony – an agent orchestrator I built for my team at OpenAI. Here I wanted to share a few behind-the-scenes bits that didn’t make the cut. Earlier this year I joined a team that had gone all-in on Codex. And it worked! It worked because we designed the software in a way that...
Vjeux once told me a story that stuck with me. It was about the good old days of the World of Warcraft. Blizzard shipped regular updates to the game, but their change logs were very sparse. The community had to figure out the details on their own, and there were a few websites that tried to provide in-depth reviews...
Many years ago, I was invited to an adventure. My colleague from Facebook was assembling a little skunk works crew for a mission at Apple’s headquarters. We were to build the first prototype of the Facebook app for Apple TV. It was 2014. Our team of 5 had React and GraphQL legends. I felt very fortunate and very...
One of my most successful side projects had exactly 2 daily active users.
Everyone needs a Get Your Shit Together day every once in a while...
In 2017 I gave a talk at Chain React about building great user experiences with React Native. At the time the tech was new and the quality of the mobile apps built with React Native was poor. The gist of my talk was that it’s possible to build great apps with React Native, one just needs to care enough. My message...
In 2017 I gave a talk at Chain React about building great user experiences with React Native. At the time the tech was new and the quality of the mobile apps built with React Native was poor. The gist of my talk was that it’s possible to build great apps with React Native, one just needs to care enough. My message...
If you want to build a web app The Hacker News Way, here's the stack you should use.
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