JOHN SIEGRIST

ABOUT ME

Welcome to my home on the web — a place for careful thought about software, architecture, and the craft of building things that last.

I'm a systems thinker in the literal sense: less interested in the parts than in the structures that connect them. I work on software architecture, AI strategy, and the business decisions that shape technical systems — and the through-line is structure: how local decisions produce global behaviour, and why systems thrive or collapse under their own weight.

The habit doesn't respect field boundaries. The same structures keep turning up in control theory and LLM agent architectures, in military mission command and software team coordination, in hyperbolic geometry and a certain famous routing problem I've been circling for twenty-five years. Finding those correspondences — precisely, not as loose metaphor — is most of what I do for fun.

WHAT I DO

I write and build in roughly equal measure. The writing lives at Software Considerations — essays on architecture, AI strategy, and the business and economic side of software, with experiments in multi-AI dialogue and the occasional diversion into my favorite routing problem. The building is further from daylight: several projects are in the works, none yet at a state I'm happy to share. The projects page tracks what's public.

PHILOSOPHY

Three commitments, one for each tense.

Respect history. My grandfather always said the cheapest lesson you can learn comes at someone else's expense. Almost no problem is new — someone has faced the shape of yours before, and their record is worth reading before you act. Solomon made the point three thousand years ago: "There is nothing new under the sun."

Understanding precedes action. When a system misbehaves, the interesting question isn't "what's the fix?" but "what structure produced this?" Most of the expensive failures in software come from answering the first question before the second.

Build to last. If it's worth making, make it right — so that what you build is still standing, and still legible, long after the decisions behind it are forgotten. Or better: write those down too.