Matt Burch

Agentic Architect | Father | Dog Person | PNW Forever

My journey is a bit unorthodox. I never thought I would end up getting into programming. I was a creative, you know. An artiste. In 2004, I graduated with an Associate's of Applied Science degree, and off I went to design websites. I discovered ActionScript and discovered how much I love the binary nature of writing code. It either works or it doesn't. No one is looking over your shoulder critiquing. I was hooked. I was meant to build things with code.

This started a 20-year journey where I was always the most senior technical person on the team for the first twelve years of my career. No traditional dev teams, no traditional dev management, it was me and my brilliant-but-not-developer CTO, across multiple organizations. At each one, building end-to-end platforms with Adobe AIR and Rails. If I wanted to learn something, I bought a book and I read it. I failed until I didn't fail anymore. I couldn't rely on anyone. I had to figure it out myself. This mindset has been the most important factor in my success with AI.

In 2022, I was working as a full stack developer for NextRoll, and one day a coworker pulled me aside and said "Man, you need to try AI". My response was "Right, I just got done with the crypto world, not doing any more scams." He said, "No, trust me on this dude, it'll be everywhere. Get ahead of it." I respected this guy, so I listened and thought "Ok, sure, let's see what it's all about."

I immediately fell in love with the mystery of it. How could I get it to do what I wanted? What was the right combination of things to say? What was the key to unlock what it could really do? I couldn't get enough and right away was a huge proponent of it. It just worked with the way my mind worked. I could go as fast or slow as I wanted. I could get information about anything to use towards decision making. It allowed my neurodivergent brain to have a buffer.

In the early days, the code generation was pretty awful, and there weren't many ways around it. But, the more I got to know it, the more I understood what I could use it for that did produce good results and helped me save time. That started my current passion, which is to determine how to elevate myself to a higher level of abstraction and make use of my years of experience to orchestrate top-tier deliverables. How much of the engineering workflow truly requires a human? That has been my question for the last three years, and it has changed almost on a daily basis due to AI's advancements.

Today I am a proud member of 4thWAIV, a collective of AI experts who firmly believe that the pathway to an AI-native knowledge worker pipeline is inevitable, and companies who want to do it right deserve to have dedicated career professionals carefully guiding them through that evolution. I am also the sole proprietor of Cascadia Logic, an AI-First consultancy that works with a number of clients to help them integrate emergent tech at any level of complexity.

The Craftspeople's Guild is such an important group and mission because of how desperately we need to start setting some standards around how we work. Over the coming months and years, there will be countless hucksters and phonies that will sully the reputation of the technology. The Guild intends to be an oasis in the desert, a place where only dedicated professionals operate at the highest levels of capability and integrity.