About

Brian Kirkby

I started programming as a kid, taught myself, and have been shipping software professionally for more than thirty years: Novell in the nineties, Adobe as a senior computer scientist, Zappos engineering, and a run as director of technology at a startup. I’ve watched a lot of technology waves arrive with big promises, and I’ve learned to tell the parts that hold up from the parts that don’t.

AI is the wave I’m most excited about. I work with it every day: language-model features, agents that do real work, prompt and evaluation design, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes all of it reliable. As I talked with people outside of tech about what it can do, most already knew it could help them. What they lacked was a starting point. I started Pheirce Bytes, LLC to make the most of this moment on my own projects, and to give other people that jumpstart on theirs.

I still design and build software end to end, so I can map out where AI fits and then sit down and set it up with you. If that sounds useful, the first fifteen minutes are free.

Talks

• Spooky Bits: An Intro to Quantum Computing ↗

  Qubits, superposition, and entanglement for working engineers, without the hand-waving.

• Understanding Quantum Mechanics: Everything You Need to Know ↗

  The ideas underneath quantum computing, explained from first principles.

• Useful Ignorance: Why We Really Don't Understand What Neural Networks Are Doing ↗

  What we can and can't say about how neural networks work, and why that matters when you build on them.

• Quines and the Limits of Logic in Formal Systems ↗

  Self-replicating programs as a way into Gödel, Turing, and the limits of what software can prove.

The other site

PheirceBytes also has a more playful front door: a cabin in the woods you can wander through, with the projects in the basement and the talks on the bookshelf. Visit the cabin any time; the toggle in the header brings you back here.