About · New York City

About.

Software engineer, more than half a decade shipping product. These days I help engineering teams make AI adoption actually stick.

Alex Tong
BORN
New York City
WATCHES
Game of Thrones · Sons of Anarchy · Robot Chicken
LISTENS
DJ Heartstring · SWIM · Chet Baker

Alex Tong.

Software engineer in New York City, twelve hours a day with . Previously at , where I learned what scale costs in sleep, then , building the paywalls and registration walls that decide when to stop a reader, and what they see when we do.

Toward the end of my time at The New York Times I went deep on AI tooling. I joined the AI Champions team that rolled Claude Code out across the roughly 500-engineer org and taught it to build with agents, delivered three presentations during the rollout, including a CLAUDE.md talk at the company's internal EngX conference, and shipped plugins the company adopted as the second-most-prolific contributor to our internal Claude Code plugin marketplace. On my own team, the Access team behind the paywalls and registration walls, I wrote the AI-assisted migration script that turned a year-plus migration into a few months of work. That work became the practice: I now run AI-native engineering enablement for engineering teams.

I write a monthly dispatch about AI tooling, music production, and side projects. Before coding I sold product for Apple, then high-end real estate in New York City. Both came down to reading what someone actually needs before they can name it, which is the instinct I build with now. I cook. I record. I'm building a small video game.

01 · The path here

Where the playbook was earned.

  1. now
    Independent
    New York

    Running an AI-native engineering enablement practice: a fix-diagnostic ROI readout, a delivery accelerator, and CLAUDE.md workshops for engineering teams.

  2. 2023–26
    New York

    Built the paywalls and registration walls: deciding when to stop a reader, and what they see when we do. Briefly, the video and audio players too.

  3. 2021–23
    New York

    Two years of scale. Learned what production really costs. Started writing every Tuesday.

  4. 2020
    App Academy
    New York

    Twelve weeks, head-down. The first commit, the first deploy, the habit that stuck.

02 · Contact

Want to talk?

Email is fastest. I reply within one business day.

There are two of us at this address. The other one only comes out at night. Enter the castle

Thank you for reading this far.

NEW YORK CITYLAST UPDATED JUL 2026END