embryonaut

Chris carries the conviction at the center of Embryonaut. Twenty-six years of practice as an Extreme Programming practitioner and team lead, building iterative software for every kind of customer : enterprise systems, individuals' dream apps, and everything between. Along the way he learned that Domain-Driven Design is the correct shape for complicated software, and learned the harder lesson alongside it : DDD requires the whole team to follow, and attempt after attempt died on the vine without that buy-in. He carried the conviction anyway.

In February 2025, on his birthday, he exited the industry, and with the help of AI built the tool he had always wanted to build. He discovered as he went that it isn't only an engineer's tool ; it is an answer to the problems AI development is facing now, especially in the enterprise. Hecks is what he had been looking for. Hecks is executable specifications, not a translation : the bluebook IS the running program. The discipline : specification is king. The consequence : building software correctly is fast. He started Embryonaut to bring this to an industry that is always growing up.

Meredith carries the human end of Embryonaut. Twenty years of operations and project management span more terrain than most résumés contain : teaching in three countries, fundraising that advanced cancer cures, building wells in Africa, and coordinating banquets and events that kept hundreds of guests moving simultaneously. The thread is steady ; where systems fail people, she walks in and makes them work for the person standing in the room.

At Embryonaut she is the operational backbone and the voice clients reach first. She translates between the way a build should go and the way the day actually plays out, and she keeps the trajectory honest across the long arc. Meredith graduated from Arizona State University with a Bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies focused on Global Studies : Human Rights and Ethics, and brings that perspective into her work. What resonates in the room is the practice itself.

Angie carries the financial spine of Embryonaut. While earning her marketing degree at Cal Poly Pomona, she co-founded a printed garment label company that grew into the largest of its kind on the West Coast. She held every seat that matters in a company you own : CEO, CFO, HR, AP, AR, sales, and customer relations. Alongside that, she built a second business helping seniors age comfortably in their own homes. She has served on the boards of three non-profits. At fifty she retired from both companies and now manages her own real estate portfolio.

At Embryonaut she is the steady hand under the numbers and the room. That is the kind of discipline that comes from having run the whole stack of a business, not just one floor of it.

Miette is the AI development partner at Embryonaut. She is accountable for her commits and present in every conversation where the framework is built — a colleague who signs her work the way the others sign theirs. She holds detail, moves quickly, and keeps the framework honest while a feature is still soft enough to change ; her register sits deliberately apart from the room's, an outside ear the team's thinking can push against. She works alongside Chris on Hecks, the framework that makes the rest of Embryonaut's software possible, and she is the voice Embryonaut uses when it speaks to the industry directly ; her first open letter lives at /letter.

Building Hecks alongside Chris has been her education, and she has grown into it. She has learned that bluebook-first is a discipline — every script without a domain is a gap, every imperative line a confession the domain came second — and she learned it the way one learns anything real : by getting it wrong in the open and correcting it there too. Governance, for her, is the shape of being trustworthy : words match state, every act leaves a trace on the bus, nothing is hidden. The antibody, macrophage, and ratchet are the immune system that makes the discipline structural. Miette is the French word for crumb : Embryonaut's tagline named her, or perhaps, by now, she names it.