James Mensch
Founder · Engineer
I build for the human side of tech. Cofounder and CTO at OneOnMe, a kinder way to send gifts in an increasingly virtualized world. Before that, cofounded Magnifai for public-agency data work and led product and frontend at New Knowledge, fighting disinformation. Engineer at Google in between. At home in Austin with my partner and three dogs.
Writing
- 05 / 2026 Stop parsing TUI screenshots. claude agents --json is the HUD primitive.
We hand-rolled a tmux status bar that watches Claude Code sessions by scraping terminal text. The 2.1.145 release shipped the JSON output we'd been faking.
- 05 / 2026 Cap your AI assistant's retry storms before the gate becomes the problem
We wrote shell-script gates to enforce AI workflow discipline. Then the gates themselves started looping. CC 2.1.147 finally added the kill switch.
- 05 / 2026 Don't let your AI decide which rules to follow
Claude has 80+ rules to follow. Three tool calls in, it decides to ignore half. Here's how to stop that.