Joshua Hutt · Seattle, WA
Full-stack engineer and team lead, twelve years in. Mostly TypeScript, React, Node, and lately a lot of Cloudflare and Claude. I ship for clients through Hutt LLC and build my own small tools on the sideSix small apps at the moment. Each one started as something I wanted to use myself.. I also talk and writePodcast or Call: long recorded calls with friends. Joshua's Words: short pieces, most days. about belief, attention, and working with language models.
Now: Building Causal Tools, consulting through Hutt LLC, and writing most days. updated September 2026
What I'm about
Most of what I build starts from the same complaint: the reasoning behind a decision usually isn't written down anywhere.I like software that puts the reasoning next to the conclusionEvery arrow on a Causal Tools timeline has a grade for how well the link is known: stated, mechanism, but-for, and so on. The grade is the part I care about most., so someone can disagree with a specific step instead of the whole thing.
I came to engineering sideways. I studied international studies and mathUniversity of Washington, 2013. Minors in mathematics and applied mathematics. I did environmental research in two of China's most polluted cities and still speak Mandarin, slowly., wrote a book about scientific documents in Word before I wrote much code, and then spent a decade shipping for companies like LivePerson, Lowe's Innovation Labs, and SamCart. Since 2023 I've worked independentlyMost engagements start with code someone else began. The work is below., which mostly means joining a team partway through a project and getting it shipped.
I care about tools that don't need to hold your datamoots parses your Twitter archive in the browser and uploads nothing. Marginer has no server at all., about writing things down, and about how people change their minds. I take a lot of photosSony a6700 lately, a Canon before that, and a phone. Mostly flowers and mountains. A pile of them is further down., and I record long calls with friends and publish them as a podcast.
If you want to work together, book a call or write to me. You can also highlight any text on this page and leave a note in the margin. That's Marginer, running on its author's site.
Things I've built
Map how things cause things.
Interactive timelines of events, beliefs, decisions, and outcomes. Every arrow carries a graded argument, and every claim carries a source. Not just what happened, but how we know.
Most disagreements are about the evidence standard, not the conclusion, so every edge carries a grade for how the link is known.
A to-do list you can talk to.
Talk through your day. An agent files the todos, catches the feelings as journal entries, briefs your morning, and learns how you work.
Tap any word of a transcript to hear yourself say it. The audio is kept, and the text is an index into it.
Highlight any page. Paste the notes anywhere.
A serverless annotation layer. Highlight text on any web page, attach a note or an emoji, and walk away with markdown. On Substack the pasted comment is the shared annotation, re-anchored for anyone else running it.
The markdown export is the storage format. There is no separate database.
Async video where replies interject in the moment.
Record a video note. Friends watch it with a live word-highlighted transcript and can hit record at any point. Playback pauses, they reply, and the reply is anchored to the exact word they interrupted at. The conversation reads, and plays back, like it happened live.
Each note is recorded as two tracks: the video for playback and a small audio track for Whisper. The word timestamps make the split possible.
Version history for a physical whiteboard.
Point a phone at a real whiteboard. Snapshots are cropped and cleaned, an AI reads them into tracked elements like tables, diagrams, and lists, and each element gets its own change history. Claude and ChatGPT can read the board over MCP.
The whiteboard stays a physical whiteboard. The software remembers what it looked like on any given day.
Your Twitter constellation.
Turn your Twitter/X archive into a zoomable constellation of everyone you talk to. Parsed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
One HTML file, about 100 KB, drawn on canvas. Your archive never leaves your machine.
Work
Full-stack engineer and team lead, in twelve industries so farRetail, conversational AI, ecommerce, finance, marketing, IoT, research, civic tech, cloud consulting, travel, education, and crypto. Some for years, some for a season.. I've delivered three AI productsGauge (2026), Capital Group (2024), LivePerson (2018). Each was built on a different idea of what people want from a model., a serverless GraphQL framework for AWS, a 3D asset pipeline for Lowe's, a data pipeline for Coinstar, and interactive research mapsOpen Zone Map, for the Adrianople Group. Every special economic zone in the world on one map. It was later picked up by the World Economic Forum's TradeTech initiative. for a think tank.
Independent consulting for clients who need something shipped.
AI marketing platform.
Ecommerce checkout platform.
Emerging-technology lab for home improvement.
Conversational AI platform.
Words and voice
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Photos
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Archive
Apps, maps, and scraps.
Turn an X thread into an argument graph or a tweet plot, with an LLM doing the reading. Demoed at the Love Symposium.
Every special economic zone in the world on one map, for the Adrianople Group. Later picked up by the World Economic Forum's TradeTech initiative.
A tool for thinking and writing non-linearly. Something like a mind map, but conversational, with AI built in as a first-class part of the interface. An idea I sat with for years before building it.
My first map for the Adrianople Group: a restart on Next.js with search, an interactive timelapse, and dynamic legends. Launched at a partner event to thousands of visitors.
White-label vote-scoring platform for the Institute for Legislative Analysis. About 500,000 votes a year, nine partner organizations publishing their own scorecards.
Led a small team to finish a stalled Sanity, Gatsby, and React marketing site: 13 page templates and 25 reusable components, on schedule.
Consumer-ready NFT onboarding and creation flow, built in two months to test a mass-market idea.
Personal finance app in React Native that shows how much interest you save by paying loans differently.
Travel planning for people who follow GSA and State Department travel policy: per diem rates, city-pair fares, offline-first. Built with PIRAAS.
My first startup attempt: local discovery.
A book, with Microsoft Press, on the STREAM Tools method for writing papers in Word.
One of the first things I built for the web.
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