Samuel Ralak

Building software, thinking out loud.

Senior software engineer and technical lead, Nairobi

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“Each prompt is a lossy compression of what you actually meant.”

From AI Will Confidently Build You the Wrong Thing

Inspectable.
Bounded.
Recoverable.

I build full-stack software in Ruby on Rails and React, and design AI workflows that are all three.

More than ten years of shipping across fintech, decentralized protocols and AI-native tools.

runs on

Koyou finds jobs worth your time, helps you write applications that sound like you, and keeps you on a steady daily rhythm. In early access.
Smith is a workflow-first Ruby library for orchestrating AI agents, with guardrails, budgets, tool policy and tracing.

See what your Claude Code subagents are doing, live.

A live terminal view of every Claude Code session on the machine, with a message box to talk to the main agent while you watch.

Also relay.rb, Ruby infrastructure for Nostr relays; Apollo, a Q&A platform for Nostr; and open-source work for the Cardano ecosystem with EMURGO.

“Most AI-generated content sounds like the same person wrote it.”

“The spec isn’t documentation. It’s thinking made legible.”
AI Will Confidently Build You the Wrong Thing
“Friction is the enemy of habit, not motivation.”
I’ve Used My Own AI to Write Every Post
“The hype is real. The capability is not.”
The Emperor’s New Agent
“Not reviewing faster. Reviewing differently.”
The New Senior Skill

Creator: KoyouNow. Fewer, better job applications, in early access.
Founder: Hadithi2026 to now. Now an animation project.
Engineering manager: Peach Tech2024 to 2025. Rebuilt the web app in two and a half months; cut AWS costs by 60%.
Senior software engineer: Kamoa2023 to 2024. M-Pesa Daraja payments and the Mono banking API.
Software engineer consultant: CoBuy2023. Moved to provisioned infrastructure in time for the private beta.
Principal engineer: Hover Developer Services2021 to 2023. Transaction processing over 30% faster.
Technical lead: AZA (BitPesa)2020 to 2021. Led a team of four on TradeBFX and BitPesa 2.0.
Senior software engineer: SafeBoda2017 to 2020. Led the move from MongoDB to a PostgreSQL data warehouse.
Led development: iHUB2015 to 2017. The Sky.Garden applications.
Languages: Ruby, TypeScript, JavaScript, Scala, Elixir, Go, PHP
Frameworks: Rails, React and Next.js, NestJS, Phoenix, Play
Education: Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, 2011 to 2014
Location: Nairobi, Kenya

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