Agents that do real work
Internal agents for code review, PR automation, and AI-assisted testing — the unglamorous parts of shipping, handed to something that doesn't get bored.
Austin, Texas
I like building things.
That's the simplest explanation for why I'm still doing this after twenty-five years.
I'm Cooper. I've spent my career making software — defense systems, console games, MMO AI, platforms serving millions of people a day, and a healthcare company I co-founded along the way. These days I'm mostly preoccupied with AI agents and what they're about to do to the way all of us build things.
Why I build
Code isn't really the point.
Code is one of the tools I've been fortunate enough to get very good at using. What I actually enjoy is taking an idea that doesn't exist yet, working out how the pieces might fit together, and making the thing real.
Sometimes that's a problem that genuinely needs solving. Sometimes I just want to know whether an idea works. And sometimes I build something because making it sounds fun, which I've decided is a perfectly good reason.
That might look like designing a large software platform, or starting a company, or automating something that annoys me, or connecting two pieces of hardware that were never meant to speak to each other, or losing a weekend to some new technology purely to find out what it can do.
The tools have changed enormously over the years. That part hasn't.
The long way around
A career that has been anything but linear
I started out in defense, writing software at Raytheon in Greenville, Texas.
In 1999 I made a fairly significant turn and moved to Austin to do something I'd wanted to do for a long time: build video games. I landed at Acclaim, working on All-Star Baseball for what were then the next-generation consoles — PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox.
From there the path wandered. Console games gave way to airline operations software, then back into games — including MMO and game AI work at KingsIsle, where I built the systems that made autonomous characters behave like they had opinions. There was time at Origin Systems in between. Then, increasingly, the web: large-scale platforms, SaaS, cloud architecture, healthcare technology, and eventually running my own company.
Today I'm a staff engineer at DaySmart Software, where I set architectural direction, stay in the codebase, mentor a team of about ten, and get to spend a meaningful part of my week building AI tooling into how we ship software.
Looking back, the common thread isn't games, or defense, or the web, or AI. It isn't really even software.
It's building things. I've been lucky enough to make a career out of continually learning new tools and then using them to make something that didn't exist before.
Along the way Raytheon · Origin Systems · Acclaim · Navitaire · KingsIsle · Scalable Path · Qwire · Ziff Davis · DaySmart
What has my attention now
AI, agents, and what they do to how we build
I don't think of AI as a feature to bolt onto a product. I think it's changing the actual craft — how software gets designed, written, reviewed, and tested. That's a much more interesting problem, and it's the one I've been living in.
Hands on the tools
Claude, Cursor, and Copilot in daily use on codebases that actually ship. Agentic workflows, prompt engineering, retrieval patterns — learned by building, not reading.
Bringing the team along
Helping engineers find where this genuinely helps and where it quietly doesn't. The goal is raising the floor without lowering the bar.
Austin
I came for the games industry. I stayed for everything else.
I moved here in 1999 to make video games, which felt like a reasonable gamble at the time and turned out to be the best decision I've made professionally. Austin had other plans for me though — the outdoors, the people, the food, the general unwillingness to be like anywhere else.
More importantly, it's where we built a family and put down roots. My wife has owned and run a dance studio here for more than twenty years, so our connection to this city runs a good deal deeper than an address.
Twenty-five years later, Austin is simply home.
I'm married with two kids. Our daughter is off pursuing musical theatre at Penn State, which means the house is quieter and the group chat is louder.
When I'm not at a keyboard I'm usually outside. Mountain biking is the real obsession — snowboarding, camping, diving, and travel round out the list of reasons I've found to not be indoors. And yes, I still play games. Given that I once moved across Texas specifically to make them for a living, I'd be hard pressed to act surprised.
- Mountain biking, mostly
- Snowboarding when I can
- Camping & diving
- Travel, whenever possible
- Still gaming, unsurprisingly
- Dance and theatre, by marriage and by daughter
Things I've built
Some of them became companies. Some are just fun.
HTC Data Solutions
Co-founderA healthcare technology company I co-founded — a HIPAA-compliant archival and records platform built from nothing on AWS, handling secure ingestion, retention, and access control for regulated data. It grew into a real, profitable business with customers who depend on it. I stay involved in an advisory capacity these days.
htcdatasolutions.comWild Card Baseball
For funA fantasy baseball card game — collect real MLB players, build a lineup, play your bonus cards, and live with the consequences of what actually happened in last night's games. It's a ground-up reboot of a game I built back in 2010, rewritten on a stack that doesn't embarrass me anymore.
wildcardbaseball.comEliminator Football
For funA survivor-style football pool — pick one team a week, get it wrong once and you're done. Built and run solo, which means every Sunday in the fall is a live-ops shift whether I planned on it or not.
eliminatorfootball.comThe tools, currently
This list has been rewritten many times over twenty-five years and will be again. That's rather the point.
Building with
Running on
Learning & using
Shipping with
Say hello.
Happy to talk architecture, engineering leadership, where AI actually earns its keep, or the best trails around Austin.