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Virden Web Design
// about

About

I'm an AI engineer, frontend-focused, who builds and directs coding agents as my primary practice — not autocomplete, a daily workflow of orchestrating single- and multi-agent systems to ship production software. It's the current specialization inside a full-stack career across regulated industries that's included CTO, frontend architect, and senior engineering roles — deciding technical direction and shaping UI/UX from scratch with stakeholders, not just implementing someone else's spec. Eight years building and securing systems in regulated financial services, healthcare, legal tech, and media — application security (OAuth/OIDC, RBAC, secure session handling, protecting sensitive customer data) has been table stakes the whole way, not a new concern for the agentic era. That's why I engage at whatever altitude a client needs: fractional CTO, corp-to-corp, W2 contract, or full-time direct-hire.

My daily practice runs a full loop, not just a review step: deep planning, an adversarial pass on that plan, synthesizing the findings into a revised plan, reviewing that synthesis, executing, then attacking the resulting code, QA, and CI checks before anything merges. That structure — not just more tooling — is what solved a real problem for me: I used to get stuck in analysis paralysis before ever writing code. Now I ship well-built, production-grade software at real velocity, including my own side projects, real unscoped personal work I'd never attempted solo before.

The throughline across all of it: I want the person on the other end of what I build to be better off for it, including work I've turned down because I didn't believe in it.

Career highlights

  • TwinWise AI (2026) — Orchestrated single- and multi-agent development workflows on an AI-first product.
  • Thrivent (2023–2025) — Led front-end direction on React/Next.js/TypeScript inside one of the strongest engineering cultures I've worked in.
  • WBD (2022–2023) — Built a shared component library used across HBO, DC.com, and other WBD properties.
  • Feedtrail (2020–2021) — Owned front-end architecture for a hospital analytics platform adopted across the US and Europe.
  • WipeRecord (2017–2020) — Rebuilt a lead-gen product into a fully custom platform as CTO, over three years.

How I work

  1. Software should leave people better off.

    That's the constant across everywhere I've worked — and the line I won't cross for a paycheck.

  2. I'm drawn to what's still unsettled.

    From my first startup's undefined problems to a protocol spec that changed shape mid-project on this very site, I'd rather build where things are still being invented than wait for them to settle.

  3. I review the agent's plan like a stranger wrote it.

    Multiple reviewer personas attack the plan — design, security, QA — before implementation starts. Once it's built, a deliberate, bounded adversarial review loop checks the code against that plan and closes gaps, before I ever look at it myself.

  4. Judgment is the job now, not typing.

    What I get paid for is knowing what to question and when "it works" isn't good enough — not writing the code by hand.

  5. Non-compromising robustness.

    When I have the time — and agentic practice means I usually do now — I build it the right way, not the way that just works.

For a concrete example of that review discipline in practice, see the case study on how this site itself was built: Rebuilding nickvirden.com