Building now
TomatoRTC: live infrastructure beyond the video call.
A programmable participant fabric for humans, agents, devices, browsers, and services operating in one coordinated real-time system.
Explore TomatoRTC ↗Founder + systems architectTechnology + creative practiceTaiwan / global
Architecturewith a human pulse.
✦ NATHANIEL “NAT” CURRIER / TOMATORTC / NAT.IO
I build and lead complex AI, cloud, WebRTC, and real-time systems, connecting architecture, engineering execution, product strategy, and customer trust.
This is also where I explore food, health, music, relationships, creative practice, and the small systems that shape a meaningful life.
Current professional practice
Founder, executive technology leader + hands-on architect.
I founded TomatoRTC to build real-time participant infrastructure for products where people, AI agents, devices, and services share live context. I also work across CTO, VP Engineering, Chief Architect, advisory, and founder-in-residence mandates where technical complexity has become a product, delivery, or customer-trust problem.
NowCurrent practice
Practicing
Repeatable meals with less weekday friction.
Small health systems designed for metabolic stability and ordinary busy days.
The meal system ↗Learning
How craft compounds across long horizons.
Consistency in music, writing, and technical work without flattening curiosity.
The practice ↗Just publishedBrowse writing ↗
Jul 2026 · 11 min read
AI Code Has a Conversation Debt
The risk of AI-generated code is not simply that it can be wrong. It is that teams lose the learning conversation that turns questionable choices into better engineering judgment.
Read the field note ↗Question of the day · Today
If your flagship AI workflow had to justify its existence in one KPI, which KPI would survive scrutiny?
Who this is forA useful filter
Stay awhile if
- You care about systems that work in real environments, not just demos.
- You want practical ideas you can test this week.
- You value thinking across technology, health, and creative practice.
Probably skip it if
- You want hype, shortcuts, or certainty where uncertainty is real.
- You prefer surface summaries over implementation detail.
- You want every idea to fit neatly inside one topic.
Technology matters when it expands human agency. This is a working notebook for technology, life systems, creative practice, and big-picture views.
Read the manifesto ↗Selected writingAll field notes ↗
Mar 2026
Rate Limiting Is Not a Counter. It Is a Real-Time Governance System.
Rate limiting looks like arithmetic in tutorials, but in production it allocates scarce capacity, encodes fairness assumptions, and shapes client behavior under stress.
Read ↗
Feb 2026
RAG Didn’t Solve AI. It Made AI a Systems Engineering Problem.
RAG became the default way to ground LLMs on enterprise data, but that did not solve AI reliability. It exposed a harder reality: retrieval is infrastructure, and the real work is systems design, governance, and evaluation.
Read ↗
Feb 2026
Shadow AI: The Systems You Don't Know Are Already Running
Shadow AI is not primarily a compliance failure. It is what happens when capability arrives before permission, and when demand outruns an organization's ability to govern what is already being used.
Read ↗
Feb 2026
Creative Recovery Days: What to Do When You Can't Produce Without Losing Momentum
Some low-output days are not failures. They are recovery days. The difference between drift and compounding is whether you know how to protect your creative system when capacity drops.
Read ↗Weekly challenges Challenge archive ↗
Pick one, run it this week, and document what changed. The goal is action, not perfection.
BUILD20 MIN
HTTP Contract Check
Verify that one API boundary behaves like an explicit contract under success and failure.
- Choose one endpoint consumed by another system or client.
- Trigger one success path and three error paths with realistic payloads.
- Fix one mismatch in status codes or error shape before the week ends.
LIVE20 MIN
Five-Hour Recovery System
Reclaim deep-work time by removing friction from one recurring task sequence.
- Pick one task you repeat at least three times each week.
- Pre-stage files, prompts, and context so startup takes less than two minutes.
- Track one week of usage and capture the minutes you recovered.
CREATE25 MIN
Creative Recovery Day
Protect momentum on a low-capacity day by shipping a reduced but intentional creative session.
- Pick a minimum viable output that can be done in one short session.
- Use one constraint (time, format, or instrument) and finish without polishing.
- Log one sentence about what preserved momentum for the next session.
DISCOVER20 MIN
Legibility Signal Audit
Improve one project update so stakeholders can evaluate your capability without guesswork.
- Choose one update or status report from the past two weeks.
- Add explicit outcomes, tradeoffs, and ownership instead of effort descriptions.
- Share the revised version and ask one stakeholder what became clearer.
From the kitchen
Carolina Gold BBQ Sauce
All the tangy‑mustard bite of the Carolina classic, sweetened with allulose and a hint of blackstrap molasses for authentic depth but just 1 g net carb per serving.
Cook this ↗About this space