About Legibility
For twenty years I have been building one thing: the tools people use to understand systems too complex to hold in their heads.
It started in college, with a website to help students schedule their courses and recruiters find top talent. Then an early Google Glass app to control your thermostat while out and about, which turned into a job at Nest doing it officially. Then understanding and debugging robots, maps, and training data. Now it’s the tools engineers use to understand how an autonomous vehicle is behaving and decide whether a change is safe to ship. Along the way I have kept shipping smaller projects on the side, recently building almost entirely by directing AI agents rather than writing the code myself.
The thread through all of it is legibility. As a system gets more complex and more autonomous, the interface for understanding and controlling it can’t be a dashboard or an API bolted on at the end. It has to be designed as part of the product. Getting that interface right is the difference between a system people trust and one they route around.
This newsletter is where I work through those experiences in public. Expect two kinds of posts:
Case studies from systems I have built or worked on: what made them hard to read, what made them legible, and what I would do differently.
Builder notes on making things while holding a day job: shipping with agents, the legal reality of side projects inside big tech, and the mistakes I would rather you not repeat.
It is written for engineers, product people, and founders who build systems other humans have to trust. No listicles, nothing I have not done myself.
My name is James Rundquist. I currently lead an engineering team at Waymo, previously built at Nest and Everyday Robots (Google X), and before that founded a startup. I also produce films, angel invest, and am always building something, software or hardware, on the side. The opinions here are mine, not my employer’s.
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