I'm James. I build things at the intersection of systems engineering, machine learning, and developer tooling — currently as a Senior Product Engineer at North, a payments platform.

I've been writing code professionally for 15 years: eBay (ML infrastructure at petabyte scale), Property Meld (employee 6, scaled to 70 people), and now North (Rust API gateway, multi-agent RAG platform).

These days I'm most interested in:

• AI-augmented development — how LLMs change how we build software, not just what we build. I use Claude, Dirge, and Gemini daily. I think about this a lot.
• Systems programming — Rust, Firecracker microVMs, container runtimes, distributed systems. I built zypi because I wanted to understand what happens under the hood when you docker run something.
• The craft of engineering — not just shipping features, but how teams work, how decisions get made, how tools shape thinking. I write about this at jamesmunsch.com/words.

zypi · A Firecracker microVM container runtime in Elixir. Converts Docker images to root filesystems, manages VM lifecycle, sub-second boot times. Writeup here.

mosaic · A federated semantic query engine built with Elixir and SQLite. Think "what if SQLite had a vector search layer and could talk to other instances?"

wasm-doc-boost · Client-side document classification compiled from Rust to WASM. GBDT inference across nine binary labels, sub-millisecond in-browser.

racklr · A multi-language transpiler toolkit in Racket. ANTLR4 grammar-driven lexer+parser generator, universal IR lowering, and target code emission.

rt-voice-wasm · Real-time speech-to-text in the browser and server. Pluggable STT engines and a voice agent framework.

autocrud · Any SQLite database, instant REST API. 120 lines of bash, no config, no schemas, no routes. Writeup here.

nest.shell · A NestJS parody built entirely in bash. File-system routing, guards, pipes, controllers, a CLI, 43 passing tests — all under 700 lines.

SQL-to-Redis transpiler · A weekend project. Parse SQL, transpile to Redis commands. Not production-ready, but the architecture holds up.

I keep a quiet blog at jamesmunsch.com/words. Some favorites:

• The Atelier: Craft, Code, and the Coming Guild — on AI, craft, and what the software trade becomes when code generation is commoditized
• zypi run, zypi go — building a programmable VM factory
• but but why not just use kata? — why I built my own container runtime instead of using the existing thing
• i heard you wanted sql in your nosql — transpiling SQL to Redis commands, for fun

I work across the stack, but these are the tools I reach for most:

Rust Python TypeScript Elixir Kubernetes Docker AWS GCP Terraform PostgreSQL Redis Firecracker LLMs RAG Vector DBs FastAPI React

📬 james.a.munsch@gmail.com · jamesmunsch.com · linkedin.com/in/jamesmunsch