Josh Crites
Technologist, educator, and systems thinker.
I am interested in sovereignty, nature (in the most comprehensive sense), and the tools people use to understand and shape the world. My work has ranged from helping developers adopt cryptographic technologies to experimenting with AI agents, private applications, dream interpretation, music learning, and new forms of collective human-computer collaboration.
This site is organized around active inquiry. Some questions may become projects or notes; others are useful because they remain open.
Professional work, personal tools, and unfinished investigations belong here together. Each is a way of testing an idea in the world.
Selected work
I led Developer Relations at Aztec, helping developers understand and adopt difficult cryptographic infrastructure. The work included education, documentation, workshops, examples, support systems, ecosystem feedback, and team leadership. Later, I increasingly explored AI-assisted developer experience and agent-readable knowledge systems.
Aztec (external site)Noir (external site)Developer Relations presentation (external site)
An exploration of private, on-chain transfers using zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption. It asks what programmable privacy can feel like in an application, rather than treating privacy as a purely infrastructural feature.
A native Android proof of concept for generating and verifying Aztec client-side proofs on the device. It explores what private application infrastructure might look like when proving, verification, and eventually wallet flows can move closer to the person using them.
A hackathon privacy application suite for ERC-20 tokens, including sealed-bid auctions, private crowdfunding, and private token voting. It was an experiment in giving people more agency in the everyday applications built on public blockchains.
Personal and emerging experiments
An experiment in using AI as an interpretive partner, not to deliver authoritative answers, but to help people explore recurring symbols, patterns, and perspectives in their inner lives.
An earlier experiment in generative identity, onchain art, and composable visual systems.
An ongoing investigation into how developer experience changes when software is increasingly written by agents: agent-readable documentation, MCP tools, evals, automated feedback loops, and interfaces spanning the terminal, IDE, web, and chat.
Aztec Claude Code plugin (external site)Aztec development environment (external site)
A planned workshop on agentic fundamentals beyond packaged products: terminal-based harnesses, always-on home servers, Raspberry Pi systems, Telegram interfaces, home automation, and multiple persistent agent sessions.
Using and adapting open-source tools while learning piano and music theory, with an interest in the feedback loops that make sustained practice more legible and rewarding.
This is an early assemblage. Some ideas may eventually become essays; others may remain provisional notes or open questions.
Documentation is increasingly used by more than a human reader. I am interested in what makes technical knowledge legible to people and capable agents without reducing it to a pile of retrieval fragments.
Good documentation carries context: why an interface exists, how it fails, what has changed, and where uncertainty remains. Agent-readable systems may need the same qualities, expressed in structures that can be queried, tested, and kept current.
Privacy is not only about keeping secrets. It is part of the practical space people need to experiment, change their minds, form relationships, and make choices that are not immediately optimized by a surrounding system.
How might we design systems that help people notice, hold, and learn from complexity rather than prematurely simplifying it into control?
I'm drawn to books that explore agency, consciousness, technological change, human development, privacy, and the emergence of new forms of order.
Exploring AI-native developer experience, agent tools, and small home-server experiments.
More about model tooling, agents, evaluation, piano, and music theory.
Privacy, agency, collective intelligence, and what it means to steward complexity.
Developing a Detroit-area workshop on agentic fundamentals and practical systems.
I am based in the Detroit area. Much of my career has involved helping developers engage with emerging technology, most recently through developer relations leadership at Aztec and work with cryptography, privacy, and developer ecosystems.
I am increasingly focused on AI, agents, developer tooling, and knowledge systems. Outside of work, I keep returning to philosophy, complexity, collective intelligence, dreams, music, education, and technologies that support agency.
Across these different domains, I keep returning to the same question: what conditions allow greater intelligence, agency, and complexity to emerge?
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[email protected]
GitHub (external site)
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X (external site)
My interest in privacy began with the cypherpunk conviction that people need systems that preserve autonomy and meaningful choice. That concern feels more, not less, important in a world increasingly mediated by intelligent machines.
Back to top"We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money."
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (external site)
