About me
James Oresti
I'm James Oresti, a senior full-stack developer based in Hamilton, Ontario. I've been writing production software for seven years, mostly in Angular, React, Node, and TypeScript, with the last two years increasingly spent on applied AI — building multi-model LLM pipelines, designing agentic development workflows, and trying to figure out where AI tools actually pay off in real engineering work versus where they just feel like they do.
What I write about
This site is where I write about that work. Most of what I publish here will be about the practice of building with LLMs — the failure modes I run into, the architectural decisions that turn out to matter, the gap between what AI tools promise and what they deliver in production. I'm interested in the boring questions more than the breathless ones: what makes one prompt structure produce reliable output and another produce nonsense, why agentic workflows succeed or fail in real codebases, how to think about cost when an LLM is in your hot path.
Currently
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Senior Engineer, QuickSeries Publishing
A lot of what I think about there is what good agentic development actually looks like in a team — the slash commands and structured briefs that would turn AI-assisted feature delivery from a black box into something a reviewer can actually evaluate. Some of that thinking has been adopted; some of it is still in progress. Either way, the questions are interesting enough that I keep writing about them.
Side projects
- GroceryHack A deal-first meal planning system that taught me more about fuzzy matching than I wanted to know.
- Private RAG application Connecting personal data sources to local and hosted LLMs. In progress.
- Shark Shield Poker A statistical analysis service for serious players that I ran for seven years before selling it to a user who loved it more than I did.
Contact
If you're working on similar problems — applied AI, agentic systems, getting reliable output from probabilistic tools — I'd be glad to hear from you. The best email is j.oresti@gmail.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and GitHub.