Applied AI with product discipline
Agents, reasoning systems, and AI tooling are only useful when they are reliable, understandable, and shaped around real workflows.
Engineering leader, applied AI
I build useful software at the edge of product and AI.
I am Dakota Kim, an engineering leader and founder. My work moves between production systems, AI agents, and small focused tools, with a bias toward software that earns its place.
Director of Engineering, Applied AI at EQengineered.
Founder of MadWatch LLC.
Approach
Technical leadership for unclear problems.
I like technology best when the complexity is handled with care and the result feels obvious to the person using it. That usually means staying close to both the code and the product.
Engineering leadership that stays technical
I lead teams through architecture, delivery, and tradeoffs while staying close enough to the implementation to keep decisions honest.
Interfaces that reduce friction
From web apps to Apple platforms, I care about small product decisions that make software calmer, clearer, and easier to return to.
Work
Selected work.
A few representative projects across independent software, applied research, open source, and focused consumer tools.
MadWatch
An independent software lab for small, carefully built apps and services.
reasoning.software
Applied research notes and experiments around reasoning systems, world models, and human-computer interfaces.
Hugging Face releases
Models and experiments exploring fine-tuning, reasoning, and agentic systems.
semanticwiki
An AI-powered documentation agent for code-aware architecture notes.
Copyist
A lightweight clipboard utility for macOS with a narrow job and a clean interface.
Daily Quest
A habit product built around gentle, long-running quests.
Writing
Notes from the work.
I write about AI tooling, agent workflows, engineering control surfaces, and the parts of craft that are easier to notice after shipping.