Joshua Hutt · Seattle, WA
I'm a full-stack engineer and team lead, with twelve years of experience. I work primarily with TypeScript, React, and Node, and prototype with Cloudflare and Claude. I work with clients through Hutt LLC and I build apps and experiments on the sideMy apps are mostly functional tools and utilities, often built to scratch an itch of my own.. I also talk and writeI host Podcast or Call (really just recorded calls with friends) and I write reflections, essays, and poems on my blog, Joshua's Words. about epistemics, attention, and working with AI.
Now: Building Causal Tools, consulting through Hutt LLC, and writing. updated September 2026
What I'm about
Most of what I build starts from the same challenge: as humans, most of our thinking is automatic, hidden behind assumptions, reactions, and unconscious beliefs. As a proponent of "open epistemics," I like software that shows the reasoning next to the conclusionFor example, every arrow on a Causal Tools describes the nature of the conntection and includes reasoning and citations to support it. (example), so people can engage with specific details, instead of reflexively tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
I came to engineering sideways. I studied international studies and mathUniversity of Washington, with minors in mathematics and applied mathematics. I also learned Mandarin and did environmental research in China., wrote a book about scientific writing in Word, and then spent a decade building and shipping for companies like LivePerson, Lowe's Innovation Labs, and Amazon. Since 2023 I've worked independently, which usually means joining a team partway through a project and getting it out the door.
I care about tools that don't stake a claim to your datamoots parses your Twitter archive in the browser and saves only the connections you see. Marginer has no server at all., about writing things down, and about how people articulate their beliefs and change their minds. I love taking photosI got a new camera and have gone on an extended photospree, split between selfies, flowers and mountains. A pile of them is further down., and I record long calls with friends and publish them as a podcast.
If you want to work together or just pick my brain, let's book a call or you can message me.
You can also highlight any text on this page and leave a note. That's Marginer in action! I read every note.
Things I've built
Maps for reality.
Build and share interactive timelines that answer the question, "how did we get here?" Each element includes detailed arguments, and claims are sourced and cited. It's not just about what happened—it's about how it all fits together.
The best question to get to the bottom of disagreements is "how do you know?" Causal Tools makes that question explicit.
A to-do list you can talk to.
Talk through your day. An agent files the todos, catches the feelings as journal entries, briefs your morning, and learns how you work. It's not therapist, but it is the next best thing.
Tap any word of a transcript to hear yourself say it. The audio is kept, and the text is an index into it.
Highlight any page. Paste the notes anywhere.
A serverless annotation layer. Highlight text on any web page, attach a note or an emoji, and walk away with markdown. On Substack the pasted comment is the shared annotation, re-anchored for anyone else running it.
The markdown export is the storage format. There is no separate database.
Async video where replies interject in the moment.
Record a video note. Friends watch it with a live word-highlighted transcript and can hit record at any point. Playback pauses, they reply, and the reply is anchored to the exact word they interrupted at. The conversation reads, and plays back, like it happened live.
Each note is recorded as two tracks: the video for playback and a small audio track for Whisper. The word timestamps make the split possible.
Version history for a physical whiteboard.
Point a phone at a real whiteboard. Snapshots are cropped and cleaned, an AI reads them into tracked elements like tables, diagrams, and lists, and each element gets its own change history. Claude and ChatGPT can read the board over MCP.
The whiteboard stays a physical whiteboard. The software remembers what it looked like on any given day.
Your Twitter constellation.
Turn your Twitter/X archive into a zoomable constellation of everyone you talk to. Parsed in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
One HTML file, about 100 KB, drawn on canvas. Your archive never leaves your machine.
Work
Full-stack engineer and team lead, in twelve industries so farRetail, conversational AI, ecommerce, finance, marketing, IoT, research, civic tech, cloud consulting, travel, education, and crypto. Some for years, some for a season.. I've delivered three AI productsGauge (2026), Capital Group (2024), LivePerson (2018). Each was built on a different idea of what people want from a model., a serverless GraphQL framework for AWS, a 3D asset pipeline for Lowe's, a data pipeline for Coinstar, and interactive research mapsOpen Zone Map, for the Adrianople Group. Every special economic zone in the world on one map. It was later picked up by the World Economic Forum's TradeTech initiative. for a think tank.
Independent consulting for clients who need something shipped.
AI marketing platform.
Ecommerce checkout platform.
Emerging-technology lab for home improvement.
Conversational AI platform.
Words and voice
Loading the latest from Substack…
Photos
Drag them anywhere. Pinch to zoom and turn them. Double-click, or tap, to see one big.
Archive
Apps, maps, and scraps.
Turn an X thread into an argument graph or a tweet plot, with an LLM doing the reading. Demoed at the Love Symposium.
Every special economic zone in the world on one map, for the Adrianople Group. Later picked up by the World Economic Forum's TradeTech initiative.
A tool for thinking and writing non-linearly. Something like a mind map, but conversational, with AI built in as a first-class part of the interface. An idea I sat with for years before building it.
My first map for the Adrianople Group: a restart on Next.js with search, an interactive timelapse, and dynamic legends. Launched at a partner event to thousands of visitors.
White-label vote-scoring platform for the Institute for Legislative Analysis. About 500,000 votes a year, nine partner organizations publishing their own scorecards.
Led a small team to finish a stalled Sanity, Gatsby, and React marketing site: 13 page templates and 25 reusable components, on schedule.
Consumer-ready NFT onboarding and creation flow, built in two months to test a mass-market idea.
Personal finance app in React Native that shows how much interest you save by paying loans differently.
Travel planning for people who follow GSA and State Department travel policy: per diem rates, city-pair fares, offline-first. Built with PIRAAS.
My first startup attempt: local discovery.
A book, with Microsoft Press, on the STREAM Tools method for writing papers in Word.
One of the first things I built for the web.
