Finding my Zen in open source.

I'm a software engineer and musician. I like the places where architecture meets the machine, abstractions start to leak, details matter, and intuition gets tested against reality.

I spent the last 11 years at BuzzFeed working across a large content-distribution platform, keeping a lot of moving parts moving while the systems underneath them changed.

These days, open source has become my lab. In some ways, it always was. Back in the early 90s, a teenage me dialed into a Slackware machine, wandered through Gopher and Usenet, and happily bashed my head against Unix while imagining I'd found some hidden entrance into the machinery of the world. The Matrix hadn't been made yet, but apparently I was already looking for the pale green terminal.

With some unexpected room to explore, that old fascination has become the center of my work: Uncompose, an open-source music separation toolkit built in Rust.

The family is intentionally small pieces connected by contracts rather than shared code:

• uncompose separates recorded music into stems while keeping the Rust core decoupled from the ML runtime.
• uncompose-project keeps provenance for derived audio local, portable, and boring in the best possible way.
• uncompose-compare is a blind A/B listening workbench, because an evaluation you can peek at is not an evaluation.

All three are MIT licensed and published on PyPI. The front door is uncompose.org.

I'm also using Uncompose to explore what software engineering looks like when AI agents become participants in the implementation loop.

Lately, I've been finding my way from /wayfinder to /to-specs¹, with a few sandcastles² along the way. I establish the architecture, contracts, and constraints, then agents implement against them. I review the work, challenge assumptions, redirect when necessary, and keep the system coherent.

I'm less interested in "AI writes code" than in what happens when implementation stops being the bottleneck on curiosity. How much farther can intuition, experimentation, and creative exploration reach when the distance between an idea and a working system suddenly gets much shorter?

So far, that experiment has taken Uncompose from first commit to three published packages and a live site in thirteen days, with thirty-plus architecture decision records along the way, automated releases, trusted publishing, and no long-lived publishing credentials.

Still figuring it out. That's the interesting part.

More at dominichanzely.com.

Resistance is futile.

Exterminate! Exterminate!

:wq