128GB of RAM, Zero Internet, and a Year of Building AI Infrastructure Nobody Asked For

Most people who know me professionally won't see my name on LinkedIn attached to a company right now. That's intentional. It's not that I'm between roles — it's that the moment you attach a title and a company name to yourself on that platform, your inbox becomes a graveyard of BizDev pitches, QA outsourcing firms promising to "augment your team," and vendors who want to "explore synergies" over a 30-minute call that could have been a "no." I've done that dance for years. I'd rather write code. What I will say: I'm still a CTO. I'm still leading technical strategy. The scope has changed — I'm working with a smaller, sharper group of people on things I actually care about — but the role hasn't. I just happen to also be writing a lot more code than I have in a decade, and the reason for that is the point of this article. About a year ago, I was running e-commerce engineering at CarID. Large teams, enterprise-scale platform, the usual orbit of architecture reviews and vendor evaluations.