CHRISDILGER

software engineer · builds with a fleet of agents

How I build

I plan in beads and ship with a fleet of agents.

Games you play with your phone, a book printed to order, and a digital twin of a house. Scroll for how it gets built.

See the projects Read the writing

How I got here

From one algorithm to a herd of agents.

2018 · University
Evolutionary algorithms

Studying at Swinburne. My first research write-up: a genetic algorithm that reduces data sets without losing what matters.
2018 · Abroad
Sarawak, Brunei, Boston

A social innovation project in Kampung Stutong Baru, then an exchange to Northeastern. Learning to build for people who are not me.
2019 · Hackathons
Checkface

We turned hash checking into something your brain does for free: a hash becomes a generated face you recognise at a glance. It grew into facemorph.me.
2020 · Teaching
Explaining things

Data engineering bootcamps and plain-English explainers like "What is an API?". Teaching is how I check I actually understand something.
2021 · Measuring
M1 vs i7 4790k

Benchmarking a new Mac against an old desktop, published in English and Chinese. Opinions are cheap, numbers are better.
2023 · Consulting
Data and platforms

Data engineering and consulting for teams who need systems that keep working after the consultant leaves.
2025 · Agents
Claude in a loop

continuous-claude: an agent running unattended, opening pull requests while I sleep. The bottleneck moved from typing to deciding.
2026 · Now
Post SaaS, not prompts

Plans live as beads, a herd of agents builds, I steer. Games, a book, a house twin, all shipping in parallel.

01 · Plan

Every idea becomes a bead first.

Beads (Jeffrey Emanuel's br, beads in Rust) is an issue tracker that lives in git, with real dependencies. br ready lists what is unblocked, so any agent can pick up the next piece without me explaining the plan again.

0 ready to claim

02 · Build

Then a herd picks them up.

herdr and ntm keep eight agent panes running side by side, each claiming a ready bead. I review, steer and merge. They type.

0/8 merged

claude-1

claude-2

codex-3

claude-4

claude-5

claude-6

codex-7

claude-8

facemorph.me

An animated morph between generated faces

03 · facemorph.me

A GPU server's job, now done by your phone.

Type any words and facemorph.me turns them into a face that does not exist, then morphs smoothly to the next. It used to need a server with a GTX 1080. The new version runs StyleGAN2 and encoder4editing entirely on your device: nothing is uploaded, and the server can retire. The port was done with autoresearch loops: agents iterating against fidelity checks until the phone matched the server.

StyleGAN2on-deviceautoresearch port

Try the preview

04 · Physical Soccer

Anything can be a controller.

Host the match on the TV. Friends join with their phones, a keyboard, a pad, or half a touchscreen: every button is its own player. Each kickoff deals a new mix of footballers or forklifts, walker frames, rain and body quirks, and one button drives whatever you get. Twenty-two playtest rounds and counting.

QR joinForklift FootballWalker BallSpec Ops

physicalsoccer.dilger.dev

A Physical Soccer match: blocky red and blue footballers tangle near the ball in a cartoon stadium

The phone join screen: scan the host QR or enter a room code

jammers.dilger.dev

Comic-style low-poly cars racing on an outback track with mesas, a windmill and bunting

The phone controller: drive and action thumbsticks, boost bar and lap position

05 · Joystick Jammers

The TV is the arena. Phones are the pads.

A party racer and demolition derby for sixteen-plus players. Open a room, scan the QR, race before the couch gets cold. The new version takes it to the outback: ink outlines, halftone shading and red dirt, split-screen on the TV, twin sticks on your phone. No installs.

jammers.dilger.dev

06 · Dilger Books

26 letters. 26 flying machines.

Aviation ABCs, written by Daniel Dilger and published by me: a 20 × 20 cm hardcover picture book from Air Tractor to Zero, printed to order. Its own storefront, page-by-page peek inside, and Stripe checkout. A little book with a big sky.

books.dilger.au

dishmate

07 · Dishmate

Small tools that solve a real annoyance.

Dishmate is a set of dishwasher decision trees: a load advisor, a troubleshooter for cloudy glasses and white film, and advice on detergent, rinse aid and hard water. A dependency-free TypeScript library with an offline-capable demo. (Spoiler: use powder, run the hot tap first, and stop pre-rinsing.)

Try the demo

08 · House twin (private)

A digital twin of a real house, from the drawings.

Walk the model and its street, switch between slab, frame and finished, mark where the power points should go, and drive a ute and trailer down the side to check it fits, and turn any view into a photographic garden visualisation. It is generated from code, so every element has a stable ID and changes show up as diffs. Rust and Bevy on WebGPU, in the browser. It stays private: a model this detailed would give away where we live.

slabframefinished

How it works

private viewer

The house twin from across the street: the generated model with stand-in trees

The same camera pose turned into a photographic garden visualisation by an image model

engine frameAI visualisation · draft proposal

SLAB

AWS Community Day Melbourne — AWS Community Day

09 · On stage

I talk about weird stuff, in depth.

Hardware wallets and why a secure element is a trade-off. AI that morphs faces in real time. Data governance nobody asked for. Cloud platforms that actually scale. Lately: what happens when you hand a codebase to a swarm of agents and a well-shaped plan. Happy to bring any of it to your meetup or conference.

Watch a talk Ask me to speak

10 · Writing