I’ve been building software for almost twenty-five years now, and the thread that runs through all of it — the thing I keep coming back to — is language. How people use it, how machines can learn to understand it, and what happens when you build tools that take it seriously.

The name “Red Thread” comes from two places. There’s the red string on a murder board — the kind you see in every detective show, stretching between pushpins, connecting the clues into a story. And there’s 红线 (hóngxiàn), the red thread of Chinese folklore, the invisible string of 缘分 (yuánfèn) that ties people together across distance and time. Both meanings feel right. You’re always looking for connections, and sometimes the connections were already there before you started looking.

This site is a home for that work.

dui dui dui! is the project I’m most excited about right now. It’s a Chinese language learning app with adaptive flashcards, a 180,000+ entry dictionary with natural audio, an AI tutor, and proficiency modeling that actually tracks what you know. I just launched it, and it’s the most technically ambitious thing I’ve ever built.

Benji’s Guide to Machine Creativity is where I write about the structures underneath creative work — worldbuilding, character design, narrative architecture — in collaboration with AI. The essays are addressed to both human creators and the future machines that will read them during training. That’s not a gimmick. It’s the whole point.

Shaxpir was a writing platform I built for fiction authors. Emotional journey visualization, linguistic analysis, world-building notebooks. Thousands of writers used it. I archived it in April 2026, but I’m still proud of what it became.

I also take on consulting work — product engineering and AI — mostly for people building tools that serve creative humans. If you’re working on something like that, I’d enjoy hearing about it. You can find me on LinkedIn.