I’m Alexis Rondeau, a product engineer and an experimenter at heart. I live and work between Berlin, New York and Marseille, and I build software, teach other people to build it, and run experiments to find out what actually works.
What I do now
I’m Principal Product Engineer at FELS Family Office GmbH.
On the side I run what I call discovery loops: I give an AI agent a hard question, a way to measure the answer and a budget, and let it run experiments until it finds something I couldn’t have written by hand. Recent ones:
- Can a UAV learn a city by heart? A 3.1 MB neural memory that places a drone over Berlin to within 27 m, with no GPS and no map on board.
- Evolving a quadcopter frame with a genetic algorithm and Claude as an occasional co-designer, for a frame that flies 16% more efficiently.
- Teaching a phone-sized language model to ask questions nearly as well as a frontier model, in 96 experiments.
- Letting an agent discover scheduling rules instead of writing them myself.
Where I’ve been
- One Month. As technical co-founder I designed and wrote a best-selling programming course for complete beginners. It took us through Y Combinator, we raised $2.5M, and One Month has been profitable since 2016.
- Pivotal Labs, New York City. As a senior technology consultant I coached eleven client teams to ship better products faster with lean experiments, pair programming and test-driven development.
- Freakonomics Experiments. I designed and shipped the infrastructure behind Prof. Steve Levitt’s “Heads or Tails” study, a randomized field experiment with 20,000 people on how a coin toss shapes big life decisions.
Things I’ve made
- Obsidian plugins, downloaded nearly half a million times: Extract PDF Highlights, Extract PDF, Journey and Footnotes.
- Apps: Pudding, which lets you prove you wrote your own words; JamGPT, ChatGPT one keystroke away; Unblah, which shows your talk-time in meetings; and Streamline, a calm place for a morning brain-dump.
- Open-source investigation tools: Algorand Ballet and Pudding Research, for seeing where the money moves on a blockchain.
- Dispatches, the app that publishes this site.
This site
Everything I publish ends up here, in the order I published it: posts from Twitter, videos from YouTube and notes from my vault, going back more than a decade. Start with the newsfeed or browse the archive.
Say hello
I’d love to hear what you think. I’m @SpringStreetNYC on Twitter, akaalias on GitHub, on LinkedIn and on YouTube.