Andy Woodruff
I build products people actually own. When you buy something, no third party should be able to take it back, change the terms, or make you ask permission to use it. Most of what we "own" digitally fails that test. I work on the things that pass it.
Most recently that meant self-sovereign identity: I was founding Executive Director of the Open Commercial Media Ecosystem (2025–2026), a creator-governed alternative to platform lock-in, working toward 100 million DIDs by 2034. The mission didn't change when the title did. Ownership, agency, and trust are the constant; the product is whatever serves them next.
Before that: 8 years shipping product across hardware and software — BSME → software developer → Product Owner → PM. PMP. I build with AI agents daily.
01 Products
Engram
Type a topic. Get a course and cards.
A calm macOS learning app. Type a topic and Engram researches it from real web sources, teaches it as a short course, and turns each lesson's self-check into spaced-repetition flashcards.
02 Ideas
- AI Coping Is Spreading Like Wildfire
The people telling you to ban AI are easy to spot. The friendly expert who mixes real facts with a settled-sounding dismissal is the one to watch.
- Generalist vs Specialist
For most of history the generalist had the edge; after the Industrial Revolution specialization took over. Now the AI era reopens the question — where on the spectrum will society land?
- From Produced by Hand to Produced by Machine
Hamming wrote in the industrial era that machines rarely produce the same product as hands did. The same is now true of LLMs and knowledge work — and the winning move is to redesign the process, not just speed it up. Here's what the Product Owner role looks like from first principles in an AI-native org.
- I Shipped an MCP Server for Madison Endurance Athletes
A FastMCP server that joins race discovery, NWS weather, and group rides into one slash-command surface — built as a portfolio piece for the FastMCP team, with two design moves I want to be known for.
03 Newsletter
Subscribe to The Shifting Current for essays on identity, agency, and the transition.