Hi, I'm Katy.

That phrase comes from Tyler Fisk and Sara Davidson's AI Build Lab community, where I'm a Founding Member of their Agent Native Boot Camp. It's the closest label I've found for what I actually do now: design and ship agent-native systems with Claude Code as my collaborator, and treat the partnership with the AI as part of the craft itself.

I've also called it "learn to build with Jarvis" — Jarvis being the name I gave my own Claude Code instance. The rule I set for myself in June 2026 was that I would only build things I personally needed, in real life, with stakes I could feel. Everything you see in the work section started in my house.

Senior UX design roots across consumer software, enterprise tools, healthcare, and government. The kind of work that taught me to take user behavior seriously, to design for the brain a person actually has rather than the brain a tutorial pretends they have, and to ship things that hold up after the demo.

I spent a significant chunk of that career inside defense — leading user research on a long-running program for the U.S. Air Force, where the stakes weren't click-through rates but operator decisions. That experience left me with two beliefs that show up everywhere in my current work: that anti-fabrication discipline matters more than presentation polish, and that the right answer almost always comes from triangulating data with the eye of someone who's actually watching the thing happen.

I hold an active TS clearance and I take the responsibility of that seriously. I mention it here because it's part of the credential layer, not the lead.

Mixed-media — acrylic, chalk paint, pastel, found paper, occasional pencil. Mostly large-scale and abstract, mostly nature-coded. The Gaia's Garden series on the home page of this site is one of those bodies of work. The studio lives at kjnstudio.com.

I paint the way I build agent systems. Layer by layer. Looking for pattern. Trusting that something coherent emerges if I stay with it long enough. The same instinct, different materials. I genuinely believe the painting practice makes the AI work better and the AI work makes the painting practice sharper. The duality isn't a hobby section on a resume; it's a feature of how I think.

Every system I've built this year started as a problem one of the people I love was actually living with. A son who needed evidence that his coach's strategy worked. A husband who needed proof that the coaching investment was producing results. A mother whose decades-long workflow needed quiet rescuing. My own ADD brain needing a single morning surface to hold the day's logistics.

None of these are theoretical markets. They're three or four people in my life with names and stakes. That's the work I want to be doing. The product-market fit was already there. I was just willing to take the family I actually have seriously enough to build for them.

I think this is the right way for individual AI builders to operate right now. The general-purpose AI products are being built by people with VC money and 200 engineers. The specific-purpose, deeply-customized, "solves a real problem for someone you know" products are being built by people like me, with Claude Code and an honest read of who they actually love.

Tyler Fisk and Sara Davidson's AI Build Lab community has been the single most important professional environment I've been part of this year. The Agent Native Boot Camp runs July through October 2026 and I'm a paid Founding Member. If you found me through that community, hi. If you didn't and you're curious, go check it out.

I live in Missouri with my husband, two boys, and the practical chaos of two kids in different schools, three sports schedules, an estate sale my husband and I are stewarding for his late father, and the occasional milk delivery I forget on the porch. I'm a USTA adult recreational tennis player and the very-amateur stats keeper for my older son's competitive junior tennis season.

I drink tea, not coffee. I have ADD that I've designed my whole life around rather than fighting. I have a Celtic-heritage-rooted instinct that I'll eventually channel into a studio name when one of these products is ready to be more than a personal practice. For now, I'm operating under my own name and that's working fine.