Miles
An ongoing record of my work and thinking Madison, Wisconsin

Hello,

I'm Miles.

I'm interested in how we build better systems — from manufacturing processes to the institutions that shape how we live.

Industrial engineering student. Work in manufacturing. Writing here about the threads that connect it all. If something resonates, or rubs you wrong, I'd love to hear from you.

UW-Madison · ISyE Class of 2027 Madison, WI
§ 00 · Premise

The through-line

Why all of this
in one place

What pulls me through everything I work on is the same instinct: things get better for people when we design systems that genuinely serve them, and worse when we don't.

On one end that means manufacturing — lean process improvement, doing more with less, building software and AI tools that actually help the people on the shop floor. On the other end, it means thinking about how we build companies, governments, and institutions that work for the people inside them, not against them.

I'm working through what I think on this in public, mostly through essays and the things I build. This site is where it all goes.

§ 01 · Now

Currently working on

Building

AI tools for manufacturing workflows

Custom applications replacing spreadsheets and paper on the shop floor — diagnostics, scheduling, quality, shift handoff.

Writing

Essays on systems & cycles

Long-form pieces on civilizational cycles, governance, and the structural forces shaping the present moment.

Reading

Political economy & governance

Dalio on debt cycles, Tainter on complexity, comparative work on what makes institutions resilient.

Studying

Industrial & Systems Engineering

UW-Madison, Class of 2027. Lean, operations, simulation — the engineering side of how things get made.

Music

DJing & set curation

Rekordbox + SoundCloud digs. Building a set-curation tool because the existing ones don't think the way I do.

Body

Training

Morning lifts, afternoon cardio. The physical version of doing more with less.

§ 02 · Writing

Essays & opinion

Featured
Essay · Long-form · Working draft

Why Nothing Makes Sense: A Young American's Guide to Our Moment in History

A working attempt to render the present legible — not through ideology, but through mechanism.

"Every dominant civilization in recorded history has followed roughly the same arc. It rises, it peaks, it declines. The particulars differ, but the mechanism is consistent. And the most striking thing about this consistency is that it appears across cultures with no meaningful connection to each other..."

Read the essay
Coming soon
Spreadsheets as cognitive infrastructure: why replacing them is a category change, not an upgrade
Manufacturing
Coming soon
Tainter's simplification: what we get wrong about “collapse”
Civilizations
Coming soon
Seven tensions every governance system has to resolve
Governance
Coming soon
From spreadsheets to smart workflows: a field report
Manufacturing
§ 03 · Work

What I'm doing

Manufacturing software · Active

AI-assisted tools for real plants

I work on custom applications for mid-market manufacturers — software that replaces the spreadsheets, paper forms, and tribal knowledge actually running shop floors today. Currently doing this through co-op work and starting to take on independent client projects.

If you run a manufacturing operation and have processes that should not still live in Excel, get in touch — happy to talk through what's possible.

Reach out
Background

Where this is coming from

I'm a few years into Industrial & Systems Engineering at UW-Madison. The combination of engineering rigor and on-the-floor reality is what made the field click for me — you can't fake your way through a maintenance schedule.

Co-ops & roles
  • Greenheck GroupAI Integration Co-op
  • RehlkoMaintenance Supervisor & CI
  • UW-Madison ISyEClass of 2027
§ 04 · Projects

Things I've built

Manufacturing App Suite

A portfolio of Claude Code applications for mid-market plants: equipment diagnostic, production scheduling, quality dashboard, shift handoff.

Claude CodeReactFastAPISupabase

MPC Maintenance AI

A RAG-based diagnostic tool for plant mechanics. Built around a synthetic work-order corpus, with local embeddings and vector retrieval.

Claude APIOllamapgvectorReact
talk.
§ 05 · Reach out

Let's talk.

Manufacturing problems, writing collaborations, pushback on something I posted, or just to say hi — I read everything.

Email LinkedIn GitHub