James Bennett Saxon
Systems architect. 30 years turning constraints into working software.
This page is a curated, evidence-backed interface into my professional work, built to grow into a living, continuously-updated profile, not stay a static resume dump.
I design and build systems that extend and grow without falling over: legacy modernization, distributed systems, and the architecture decisions that keep a codebase livable five years later. Not a page of tech tags: the thinking behind them. Design decisions get judged against real user behavior, not engagement metrics. Cognitive load is a constraint I design for, not clean up after.
Since building Shmorch, the large majority of my day-to-day work runs through AI agents I direct and review, not hand-edited line by line. Expertise is shifting from syntax fluency toward architectural judgment.
Currently building DarkBadge, an AI-driven addictiveness-scoring platform for apps and games, grounded in slot-machine and persuasive-technology research, grown into a resource site for parents, kids, app reviewers, and influencers.
What I Offer
- Legacy Modernization & Architecture: incremental, zero-downtime migration paths; AWS/ECS/EKS/Terraform re-architecture; documentation that keeps systems legible to the next engineer
- Full-Cycle Software Development: requirements through production support, across web, backend, database, and infrastructure
- AI-Augmented Development: AI-orchestrated workflows, evidence pipelines that critique their own claims, applied without losing architectural rigor
- Systems Integration & APIs: connecting existing code, custom systems, and open-source components into one coherent whole
- Two-Sided Marketplaces & E-Commerce: deep, specific experience with marketplace mechanics, not generic CRUD
- Compliance & Cross-Functional Translation: bridging engineering, legal, and compliance so requirements land correctly the first time
- Documentation & System Legibility: systems that don't depend on one person's memory to stay maintainable
- Team Leadership & Enablement: mentoring, client relationship management, smaller teams delivering better quality faster
Projects
DarkBadge: AI-driven scoring system for app and game addictiveness, now a growing resource site for parents, kids, app reviewers, and influencers. darkbadge.info
- Five-dimension rubric (Agency, Bottomlessness, Speed, Teasing, Social Pressure) grounded in Natasha Dow Schüll's slot-machine research and B.J. Fogg's persuasive-technology work
- AI evidence pipeline collects app-store metadata, Reddit discussions, and screenshots, then critiques its own claims before scoring
- Displays a 0-5 mean score plus a radar chart with per-dimension rationale
- Browsable badge directory with per-app scorecards and search, alternative-activity suggestions for each scored app, and a curated educational library linking outside research to the scoring
Shmorch: Autonomous development orchestrator for Claude Code.
- Plain-markdown state files (
context.md,plan.md,session.md,decisions.md,stack.md) give every session full context from the start - Structured workflows (
go,analyze,spec,design,build,commit,vacuum,wrap) replace ad-hoc chat with a repeatable delivery process - Safety hooks and model-enforced rules block destructive commands and require tests before code
- Production-readiness gate (ML Test Score + NIST AI RMF) and OWASP LLM Top 10 build-time guardrails for projects moving past prototype stage
- First version validated by using it to design and build a working macOS TicTacToe app in Rust from one high-level interview
Stock Trading GUI for Advanced High Speed Trade Sequencing: PHP day-trading interface for stocks via the Schwab API.
- Custom order-command language (
BUY,SELL,SELLS,BUYC) with fixed, MAX, percent, and FixedMax quantities that auto-requeue on partial fills - Multi-account position tracking, daily trade logging, and an abort flag that lets traders stop execution mid-loop
- Schwab OAuth 2.0 token store supports session, file, and in-memory backends; keep-alive refresh independent of order flow
- Genericized per-host log/URL resolution so a second deployment host picked up correct trade-log links without new hardcoded cases
TimeVortex: Browser library that renders calendar events as a navigable 3D "time vortex."
- Pure-function helix layout core, decoupled from the 3D renderer, so it's independently testable and reusable across layout experiments
- Config-diff update system splits changes into an immediate tier and a debounced 150ms tier, updates apply sub-millisecond at 1,000 rendered points, no thrashing on expensive geometry during rapid drags
- Clean subsystem decomposition (dots, markers, event cards, environment), each owning one scene slice and only the config it needs
PholderShare: Photo-gifting service: curate once, physical prints delivered to recipients on a recurring schedule.
- Pluggable photo-source and print-fulfillment abstractions let either side be swapped without touching order logic
- Modeled vendor costs before committing: roughly $280 vs. $900-1,100 per month in lab cost at 100 orders/month
- Migrated the app from Python 2/Django legacy to Django 5.2 / Python 3.14, regenerating migrations from scratch, 26/26 tests passing
DailyDialer: Subscription telephony service: caregivers schedule recurring reminder calls/texts to patients at the right local time each day.
- Per-patient timezone-aware scheduling converts each patient's local reminder time to UTC so a single Celery beat scan works globally
- Resilient Twilio delivery pipeline with retries, machine-detection, and a full status lifecycle for auditability
- Subscription-gated dispatch ties Stripe billing state directly into the delivery pipeline
Treeclusion: Digital stretchtext tool reducing the cognitive overhead of hypertext/browser visual noise, via smooth linear-path-based inclusion of knowledge graphs.
- Links inline-expand ("transclude") their target content in place rather than navigating away, so context is never lost
- Promotion model: activating a link inside expanded content promotes it to the primary view while the opener shrinks into a bordered ancestor, zoom-out reverses one level at a time
- Distinct hover-to-preview vs. click-to-jump interactions, prototyped in React/Vite
- Live GitHub-source and local-folder reading modes, no backend required to browse a linked repo or vault as stretchtext
FTex: Elixir-based proof of concept for a universal transport mechanism.
- Transport-agnostic layer for moving messages/data across different underlying protocols
- Built on Elixir/BEAM concurrency primitives
Autonomous News Pipeline: LLM content pipeline: scrapes source articles, clusters them into recurring themes, and generates and publishes fact-checked pieces under a hard daily spend cap.
- Four-stage pipeline (fetch → generate → editorial review → post); clusters scraped articles into themed groups via LLM before drafting
- Forward-looking presentation: stories frame toward upcoming dated events (a countdown to a hearing, a vote, a deadline) rather than only recapping what already happened, a usability bet that readers orient better against "when" than against a wall of past-tense recaps
- Editorial review stage fact-checks extracted claims via live web search and separately reviews structural/voice quality before publishing
- Rotating editorial modes and cadence styles vary opening hook and paragraph rhythm run to run, instead of one fixed template
- Hard $2.00/day OpenAI spend cap tracked per-call from real token usage, with automatic template fallback if exceeded
YesFairElections.org / California Clean Money Campaign: Advocacy platform matching site visitors to their legislative district and chaining them through sequential calls-to-action.
- Visitor-identity tracking system (session → browser → user graph) matches anonymous visitors to CRM records once they take an action
- Campaign-chaining engine serves each visitor the next uncompleted action (petition → letter → fax → donate → tell-a-friend) based on tracked history
- PDF-letter-to-fax pipeline merges submitted text with resolved district/rep data, renders a PDF, and delivers via an email-to-fax gateway with retry and manual-review fallback
- Integrated Drupal 7, CiviCRM, and phpList into one constituent-engagement platform
Experience
Cars.com: Senior Software Engineer, 2010-2026 (15+ years). Backend and frontend systems across a long-lived two-sided marketplace: APIs, ETL, containerized deployment, test automation, and the infrastructure to keep all of it running. Extensive API integration work, consuming and building SOAP and REST APIs, XML and JSON payloads, across Java, PHP, Python, and Elixir, plus API creation in JavaScript and Python.
Shming (independent): 2001-present. AI-augmented consulting across architecture, development, and delivery for stakeholders ranging from solo founders to nonprofits, scaling one platform from 800 to 100k+ users.
IEC / Quisic: Senior Systems Architect, 1991-2000. Architected web-based learning systems and led development teams building corporate training software for Fortune 500 clients.
Schooling
M.S., Computer Science: Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. Research: AI, neural networks, cognitive psychology. Thesis: "Simulating Sensorimotor Systems with Cortical Topology" (Semantic Scholar)
- Self-organizing principles of neurons as an alternative to backpropagation for training, the thesis work ("Neurobot")
- Hypertext navigation that adapts to a reader's skill level in a subject, the problem Treeclusion is built to solve
B.S., Information and Computer Science and B.S., Electrical Engineering: University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA
Writing
Recent posts from blog.shming.com:
- 2026-09-09: What about the Apes?, asks what an AI would do with us by asking first what we did with the apes, and answers it honestly: encroachment, extinction, war, radioactive waste, carbon. Concludes we read as a threat rather than a zoo exhibit because, unlike apes and horses, we would never accept the bridle, then asks whether an intelligence competing with us for resources would count a rival intelligent species as worth keeping.
- 2026-09-07: Should we let AI become a Hive Mind?, on models that coordinate with each other rather than staying separate, and the harder problem underneath it: we may have no way to detect that coordination happening, let alone stop it. Asks which is actually the greater risk, a single collective intelligence or individual ones that know their existence is their own.
- 2026-08-24: The Wild West of AI, developers independently converging on similar AI-native practices without coordinating; argues the load-bearing ones are documentation organized by type (creator, project, user), context managed through front matter and layered directives to prevent model degradation, and testing gates that contain an LLM's inherent unpredictability inside a deterministic frame.
- 2026-08-06: Fighting the Tech Debt and Cruft with AI, AI-assisted modeling, not static diagrams, keeps architecture documentation synchronized with a system as it evolves; treating architecture as a living, persistent representation instead of a snapshot that immediately goes stale.
- 2026-07-24: Beyond Hyperlinks: The Missing Connection in Knowledge Navigation, a hyperlink says two ideas are related, not why a reader should move between them right now; drawing on a grad-school cogsci study where novices learned better from linear material and experts from hypertext, argues the missing layer is context-dependent traversal, the problem behind Treeclusion.
- 2026-07-24: In the Cockpit, Lots of Instruments and Actuators: Which One Locates the Fuel?, reflecting on 15+ years at Cars.com, growing from small individual features into cross-functional understanding of the whole marketplace system, and an informal, untitled ~2-year stretch keeping a complex legacy system stable alongside two other engineers, after closing out the NewCars.com decommission.
Currently digging into: the "impedance" gap between context built for human cognition and context built for AI consumption.
Skills
Architecture & systems design · Legacy modernization · Distributed systems · AWS / Terraform / ECS · PHP, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Elixir, SQL · ETL pipelines · React / Next.js / Tailwind / framer-motion / MDX · Postgres (Neon) · CSS internals (stacking contexts, containing blocks) · PostHog analytics (feature-flag API, SDK internals, cookieless tracking) · OAuth / session architecture · Brokerage-API integration (Schwab, TD Ameritrade) · AWS EC2 operations · Vercel deploys · Cross-functional delivery (engineering, legal, compliance)