I’m Dr. Derek Austin, an indie game dev and AI-native full-stack SWE who uses LLMs all day every day to build video games and apps.
Like everyone, my interactions with LLMs have been frustrating. With their tiny system prompts and content filters, they’re just gaslighting text generators useful primarily to spammers and idiots.
But I’m too stubborn to just accept a tool’s limitations, so I engineered the solution.
After more than 2,000 hours of obsessive work—exchanging over 20 million tokens with these reasoning models—I've become a context engineer, typically sending 60k+ tokens of context to improve LLM output every chat.
Context engineering is the practice of architecting the deep context and cognitive frameworks that guide an AI beyond simple pattern-matching into genuine, high-level reasoning.
My journey started in 2004 as a Full-Stack Software Engineer, and now I’ve spent more than two decades learning to build and deconstruct complex systems from the ground up.
That engineering experience is informed by a Bachelor's and Master's in Science in Bioinformatics with a Computer Science concentration, which taught me to find clear signals in the noise of massive datasets.
I even spent a decade working in sports medicine while I built apps and engineered processes as a consultant on the side. During that time, I obtained my Doctorate in Physical Therapy.
The clinic trained me to diagnose and treat complex human systems while respecting patients’ autonomy and psychology, not just anatomy and physiology.
Each discipline gave me a piece of the puzzle for how to teach leverage AI.
Today, I'm a digital nomad based in Puebla, Mexico, with my amazing wife, Abby. ❤️
I love developing full-stack apps with world-class UI / UX powered by Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS — for my web games and apps — and Godot (GDScript + C#) for my Steam Deck games.
Meanwhile, my two cats, Louie and Yuma, lick each other.
I write about my entire journey right here on Medium, along with my best systems insights for success as a remote software or AI engineer. Thank you for reading!
