joe curlee

About

What I do

My work sits at the intersection of product engineering, tooling, and independent software projects. I have worked across healthcare, e-commerce, analytics, and games, in roles ranging from individual contributor to engineering leadership.

I care most about building software that is useful, maintainable, and thoughtfully designed. My background also includes graphic design coursework, which still shows up in how I think about interfaces, product feel, and the overall shape of a tool. That includes production web applications, custom internal systems, desktop AI tools, and smaller experimental projects that let me explore new ideas quickly.

Selected work

Some of the work I am most comfortable pointing people to includes AI Runner, an open source desktop application for running local AI models; Cowboy Casino, an indie retro-styled game built from the ground up; and a long body of professional engineering work spanning team leadership, architecture, and hands-on delivery.

If you want more detail, you can browse my projects, professional roles, and selected client work.

Writing

I occasionally publish exploratory writing on AI, consciousness, and related questions. The piece I currently feel most comfortable sharing publicly is The Consciousness Gradient: Qualia, Integration, and the Emergence of Intelligence, which argues that consciousness and qualia are the same phenomenon at different degrees of integration and treats intelligence as an emergent consequence of sufficiently deep qualitative integration.

Read The Consciousness Gradient on Zenodo

Elsewhere

You can find my code, projects, and profiles on GitHub, Bluesky, Hugging Face, itch.io, and elsewhere on the web via the links page.