Sreenath Pillai

Hey everyone,

I'm a self-taught software developer based in the USA (Midwest), and have run a software shop for 15+ years ('09-'24). I just went through a literal movie in life the last 2 years, few of you would believe my story if you weren't in my city or knew me personally.

I'm starting life from scratch, with a blended family and 5 kids. Have not found consistent work since last November, and been playing with AI Coding tools. I realized I get better results than most software engineers using AI Coding tools (and way better than pure Vibe Coders), and that's because I've always spent 80% of my time planning and 20% coding+testing.

I took this spec-first, architecture and planning heavy approach to using AI Coding tools and started building a product, ChainCatalyst, with a good friend of mine. I have a tool for greenfield development (Architect) and one for existing codebases (Workflow). The idea is to be platform-agnostic, and the best planning layer between a software developer and consistent, high-quality results from AI Coding tools.

We are currently significantly better than SpecKit and also have advantages/differences over Kiro (Kiro is awesome though, ngl, but we aren't really trying to be them, they just are in a similar space). We have a group of ~20 (10 daily active) users and 2 companies (software shops each with 50+ devs, only a few from each company using so far) using the product. Feedback has been really great.

I'm still planning a PH launch while messing around here and looking at people's posts, getting into the community, etc...probably within the next month or so. Just wanted to say hi and introduce myself and what I'm working on.

Cheers