Kyle McDonald

i made a tool to help me build tiny off-grid solar power systems for remote pacific islands. in the past i would have named and released it. but i am increasingly doubtful that i can build a tool for others any better than they can build it for themselves.

i tried opus 5.5. for 15 years my bio has said "artist working with code". today i changed it to "artist".

i'm not "working with code" anymore. i'm thinking in systems, and writing in natural language. i've only been programming for 25 years. any code i write is going to be vastly inferior to a frontier model.

we built a tool to traffic private jet emissions during the world cup and other events. it's pretty bad 🤮

no single tool or art project will "fix" climate change. our job as imaginative people with technical skills is to form a distributed but aligned ecosystem of creative interventions that identify harms, care and repair, and replace toxic patterns

new article about icespy.org! DOJ has been using my 2018 art project as justification for arguing with states that ICE agents need to be allowed to wear masks 😩

only problem is: no one is using the site, and face recognition doesn't even work like this.

new article about icespy.org! DOJ has been using my 2018 art project as justification for arguing with states that ICE agents need to be allowed to wear masks 😩

we built a tool to traffic private jet emissions during the world cup and other events. it's pretty bad 🤮

i've had a pet technical problem for ten years. i know the solution space inside and out. a few months ago gpt-5.5 made a massive leap that broke new ground, but the solution was not elegant. last night, fable found the elegant solution 😳

it's my first time making merch! binary stacks (2008) knit shirts and sweaters now available in collaboration w glitchwear.store 🤗

there are 1024 unique designs, and every item has the seed printed on the back near the collar

it's my first time making merch! binary stacks (2008) knit shirts and sweaters now available in collaboration w glitchwear.store 🤗

one stitch per pixel create.glitchwear.store/kyle

i made an app for tracking whether the oligarchs are actually fleeing city centers ews.kylemcdonald.net

there was a small spike with the "whole civilization will die" tweet. i wanted to respond to recent trends in the polymarketification of everything, abundant vibecoded dashboard slop that makes us feel like we know more than ever while also having less power than ever.

i made an app for tracking whether the oligarchs are actually fleeing city centers ews.kylemcdonald.net

the fencing visualization system i worked on with rhizomatiks is coming to los angeles this weekend 🤗

the team at rhizomatiks handled the hardware, visualization, & data collection. i handled blade tracking, which meant training multiple custom convolutional neural networks and deploying them across 24 GPUs to track the entire curve of the 1px wide weapons at 60fps in realtime

i made an app that checks if your contacts are in the epstein emails myepstein.com apple rejected it from the app store because it “capitalizes on current events” but you can still try it on testflight

i'm vibecoding a 3d model that is generative but needs to meet certain topological requirements. i was having trouble asking for what i wanted, so i asked for a face selector and copied IDs to the clipboard. i pasted the IDs with a request ("merge faces like this"), now it works

after 2.5 years of vibe coding, my biggest takeaway? native apps are dead. iterating for the web is so much faster, has better tooling, and lower overhead. low-latency, multi-projector, 3d, spatial audio, custom hardware—ai will continue to have trouble with these.