Why hello there.

I’m a Chicago software engineer who loves to move fast and (Usually) fix things…

What I am for.

I think we’ve slid into a trap where our political beliefs are defined as being “in opposition to” another groups. This ensures an antagonistic, us-verses-them mentality while the “elites” watch. So here’s a list of things this dirty liberal is for, not against. The 8-Hour Day The idea that your life isn’t owned by your employer. This standard was the result of decades of bloody struggle by labor activists and unions against 10, 12, and even 16-hour workdays. The slogan was “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will.” Citation: Eight Hour Day - Wikipedia ...

October 1, 2025 · 4 min · 836 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

AI in the Classroom: Product Blueprints from the 'Hard Fork' Podcast

For AI engineering leaders, the annual back-to-school season isn’t just a cultural milestone; it’s a market signal. It marks a massive influx of users engaging with digital tools, testing the limits of existing platforms, and revealing unmet needs. The recent “Hard Fork” podcast episode on AI in education serves as a potent source of raw user research, offering a direct line into the mindsets of educators, innovators, and the students who form the next generation of knowledge workers. ...

September 5, 2025 · 6 min · 1276 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Slop: Testing Automated News Gathering

Chicago Communities Prepare for Mexican Independence Day Amid Immigration Enforcement Concerns Chicago’s Mexican-American communities are moving forward with Mexican Independence Day celebrations this weekend despite warnings from Gov. J.B. Pritzker that federal immigration agents may target cultural events, leading organizers to implement unprecedented security measures involving volunteer networks and communication systems. Governor Warns of Coordinated Timing Gov. Pritzker issued a stark warning Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations appear deliberately timed to coincide with Mexican Independence Day festivities across Chicago. ...

September 4, 2025 · 6 min · 1112 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

That terrible presentation, the enshittification of OpenAi

Thinking about the GPT-5 presentation fiasco yesterday(friends don’t let friends use Dalle for charts) and the resulting, almost overwhelmingly negative reaction to the style of the speakers and the substance. I’m wondering if what we’re seeing is less a problem with LLMs having hit a ‘wall’ and more with the ’enshittification’ of OpenAI itself? They’ve never been particularly strong on the pure research side of things. Their main strength has always been productizing scientific breakthroughs in consumer products. Take the fundamental ‘attention is all you need’ paper and transformers architecture. Neither of those were OpenAI breakthroughs. Instead, their incredibly talented early team identified ways to capitalize on those important insights with their own breakthroughs in model training and scaling. ...

August 8, 2025 · 4 min · 666 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

What 50 First Dates can teach us about LLM memory

You’ve been there. You and your AI coding buddy are in the zone. It’s feeding you perfect snippets of code, it understands your weirdly named variables, it’s practically reading your mind. You’ve built half a dozen functions, and the project is humming along. Then you close the window. You come back an hour later, open a new chat, and ask it to build the next piece of the puzzle. The AI stares back at you with the digital equivalent of a blank expression. It has no idea what your project is, what a user_auth_service is, or why you keep muttering about the global_config.json. It has, for all intents and purposes, become incredibly dumb. ...

August 2, 2025 · 5 min · 899 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>