Jonathan Hawkins/Builder of AI-native products
I turn frontier model
capabilities into products people can actually use.
20+ years shipping games — two-time Game of the Year winner on God of War and Eclipse: Edge of Light. Now solo-founding Aligned Tools at the edge of agentic AI.
01—Featured work
Three case studies.
Projects that show the through-line: take a frontier capability, ship a product around it, fast.
Aligned Tools
A company brain for teams whose work lives across every tool
- Problem
- Engineering managers and producers lose 30–60 minutes per meeting translating decisions into tickets — and then spend the rest of the week reconciling the same task across Jira, Linear, Asana, Notion, and Monday because nobody on the team uses the same tool. Action items slip, ownership is ambiguous, and the trail back to the conversation that produced the work is gone.
- Constraint
- Solo founder, B2B SaaS, in active enterprise sales cycle — must hit security review on day one and integrate with the customer's existing stack rather than ask them to switch.
- Move
- Aligned ingests work from wherever it actually happens — Zoom and Google Meet recordings, Microsoft Teams, Slack channels, Gmail threads, Google Calendar — runs it through a Claude pipeline that extracts decisions, commitments, and ownership, and proposes structured tickets in a diff-style review UI where every human edit is a one-click correction that becomes training signal. On the output side, it writes and bidirectionally syncs those tickets across Jira, Linear, Asana, Monday.com, Notion, and GitHub Issues with per-provider project, status, priority, and issue-type mapping. The hard call was committing to round-trip sync rather than one-way write — it makes the integrations roughly 5× more complex, but it means the customer keeps their tool of choice and Aligned becomes the connective tissue underneath. Auth is SSO-only, every tenant is isolated, and transcripts are dropped after ticketization unless the customer opts in. Built SOC 2-aligned from day one: app-layer AES-256-GCM token encryption with key rotation, hash-chain audit logs, per-tenant secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, and Clerk-enforced MFA — which is what got the security review through on the first pass.
- Outcome
- In active enterprise sales with a name-brand AAA game studio: MSA and two SOWs in negotiation after passing CIO-level security review. Production data shows >99% sync fidelity across 500+ tasks moving bidirectionally between Jira, Linear, Asana, and Notion in live tenants. Median time-from-meeting-to-tickets dropped from ~45 min to under 3, with full transcript provenance on every shipped ticket. Codebase is ~1,400 React components, 485 database migrations, and 11 OAuth integrations behind a SOC 2-aligned control surface.
VibeView
Spatial multi-agent orchestration for Claude Code
- Problem
- Running a swarm of Claude Code agents in parallel is powerful but illegible. Output streams interleave in a flat terminal, work-in-progress is invisible until something breaks, and there is no way to compare what 5 agents are doing against the same plan.
- Constraint
- 28 hours, solo, at the SensAI hackathon — cross-platform spatial UI from scratch.
- Move
- I built VibeView as a WebSpatial app that arranges live Claude Code sessions as panels you can walk around. Each agent gets its own surface streaming stdout/stderr; a shared planning layer sits above them; dependencies between agents render as spatial links rather than text. The hard call was choosing WebSpatial — it ships to visionOS, web, and mobile from one codebase, but the docs are sparse, so I had to reverse-engineer the renderer from runtime behavior. I kept the orchestration logic in a thin Node bridge so the spatial layer stayed presentational.
- Outcome
- Shipped end-to-end in 28 hours, demoed live driving a 5-agent swarm against a real codebase. Won a category prize and a follow-up call from the WebSpatial team.
SkillVault Desktop
Making Claude Code's invisible config visible
- Problem
- Claude Code's power lives in env vars, hooks, slash commands, and skills — but they are scattered across files, undocumented in-product, and impossible to compare across projects. New users hit a wall; power users build the same scaffolding over and over.
- Constraint
- Consumer-facing desktop app, must feel native on macOS, ship a marketplace from day one.
- Move
- SkillVault Desktop is a single pane that reads your Claude Code config across every project, surfaces what is actually wired up, and lets you install vetted skills/hooks/commands from a marketplace with one click. The harder design call was the diff: when a user installs a skill, they see exactly which files change, with rollback. I built it on Tauri so it stays a 12 MB binary instead of a 200 MB Electron app, and the marketplace is just signed manifests in a public repo so anyone can publish without a backend.
- Outcome
- Public beta launched with 40+ community-contributed skills in the first week. Average user activates 6 skills in their first session.
02—Supporting work
More things I've shipped.
Side projects, weekend builds, and open-source experiments. Most ship a real product — even the small ones.
- 01
LabFork
A GitHub for agentic research — fork labs, run agents on papers.
AgentsResearchNext.js - 02
voxherd
Voice-first multi-instance Claude Code controller for iOS.
iOSVoiceClaude Code - 03
TinkerSchool
Open-source AI homeschool platform for K–6 with M5StickC.
EducationHardwareOpen source - 04
Patina
A C++ → Rust conversion of the Godot engine.
RustGame engineGodot
03—About
A little context.
20+ years in games. Started as an intern at Sony Santa Monica and rose to Lead Level Designer over a decade, shipping God of War 1, 2, and 3 along the way. Was one of four hand-picked leads on a new unannounced AAA IP, managing 15+ designers.
In 2014 I founded White Elk Studios and recruited a small team of God of War franchise veterans to build Eclipse: Edge of Light — a VR adventure that won three Mobile VR Game of the Year awards (UploadVR, Daydream District, VR Fest 2018) and shipped to 8 platforms including PS VR, Oculus Quest, Steam, and Nintendo Switch.
In 2011 I founded GameDevDrinkUp — a monthly mixer that virally scaled from LA to 20+ cities worldwide, sponsored by Twitch.
Now solo-founding Aligned Tools. I take frontier model capabilities the week they ship and turn them into products non-engineers can use the same week.