smorin - Overview

Hi there 👋

Hi, I'm Steve 👋

📍 New York City ↔ San Francisco | 🧪 VP of Engineering @ Flox | 🚀 Former: Founder & Asana, Instagram, & Yahoo!

Working with Ron Efroni on the future of agentic infrastructure — reproducible environments, deterministic agents, and the build loop after CI/CD. Leading Flox's AI transformation across engineering.

If it isn't reproducible, it didn't happen. Spending most of 2026 figuring out how engineering org workflows change when agents do the typing.

🌱 flox.dev — open source infra for reproducible environments and agentic workflows.

Start Here

• 🌱 Flox — reproducible dev environments built on Nix, the AI-transformation layer for your build loop
• 🎤 GitHub Universe 2026 — two panels on agentic infrastructure (see Speaking below)
• 🦉 thoth — multi-provider deep-research CLI; orchestrates OpenAI Deep Research + Perplexity in parallel
• 📺 TikTok / @stevemorinnyc — making AI concepts make sense for people who don't have time to read papers

Current Projects

• 🦉 Doxa Research — AI-powered research assistant; CLI that runs deep technical research across OpenAI and Perplexity in parallel and ships clean, citable reports
• 🌀 thothspinner — Claude Code-inspired TUI animation library for Python (Rich-based): spinners, progress bars, timers, shimmer effects
• 📝 envgen — Generate and validate .env files from a single spec; self-documenting, consistent across environments, secrets stay out of git
• 📐 agent2linear — Linear CLI built for humans and AI agents; optimized to minimize token usage and context-window waste
• 🔀 toggle — Rust CLI + library for toggling, adding, removing, and updating code/comments across many languages, with configurable extension mappings
• 🌳 worktreeflow — CLI for spinning up git worktrees against OSS projects and managing PRs without losing your mind
• 🐍 py-launch-blueprint — Production-ready Python project template with the best practices already wired in
• 🌱 filegardener — File maintenance utilities: dedup, only-copy detection, prune empty dirs
• 🪨 substrata — Foundational tooling layer (WIP)
• 📦 vagrant-flow — Vagrant plugin for a seamless dev-to-prod workflow with Ansible; auto-generates inventory files, runs playbooks, manages hostfiles
• 🤖 claude-fusion-launcher — Run Claude Code on a panel of models instead of one; OpenRouter Fusion answers in parallel and a judge model merges them into one stronger answer
• 🙌 contributors-please — Incremental, path-aware contributor recognition; generates CONTRIBUTORS.md without clobbering maintainer edits (npm CLI + reusable engine)
• ⚙️ contributors-please-action — GitHub Action wrapper for contributors-please; discovers contributors from commits + the GitHub API and renders contributor markdown on every push
• 🏭 template-press — Reusable init / post-init engine extracted from py-launch-blueprint for scaffolding new projects
• 🎬 mockcast — Vaporware demos as code: render scripted terminal sessions to asciicast v3 (and GIF via agg)

What I'm Building at Flox

• 🧬 Flox CLI extension system — Rust port of the gh extension architecture, with environment inheritance and a phased rollout plan
• 📊 nixpkgs vs Homebrew strategic dashboard — coverage, freshness, overlap; informing where Flox lifts vs. competes
• 🤖 Codex-plugin-shaped long-running agent — broker / job-tracking architecture inspired by the OpenAI Codex plugin for Claude Code
• 🚀 AI transformation — helping transform culture to be AI First: pair programming show-and-tells, tooling standardization (Anthropic + OpenAI), shipping real features, producing artifacts to train the rest of the org

Speaking

• 🎤 GitHub Universe 2026 — Secure every commit track "From Vibes to Verified: Engineering Deterministic, Secure Agents" with Ron Efroni (Flox), Dex Horthy (HumanLayer/CodeLayer), Ankur Goyal (Braintrust)

Previously

• 🛫 CTO, Tripping.com (acquired by HomeToGo)
• 📸 Engineering Leadership, Instagram
• ✅ Engineering Leadership, Asana
• 📞 Engineering, AT&T

GitHub Activity

What I'm Doing

• Leading an AI transformation — pair programming workflows, tooling standardization (Anthropic + OpenAI), shipping the boring rails so the interesting work compounds
• Teaching AI on TikTok — translating agentic patterns for engineers who don't live on hn
• Hiring — Flox is bringing on contractors and full-timers around platform + Nix work
• Hiking — the only meeting I never reschedule

Connect

Philosophy

"Reproducible or it didn't happen." Most engineering wins are unglamorous: shorter feedback loops, fewer special snowflakes, more determinism. Agents amplify whichever side of that ledger you've invested in.