Kyle Snow Schwartz
Wellington, New Zealand · US/NZ dual citizen|+64 204 065 8034|Kyle.SnowSchwartz@gmail.com | kylesnowschwartz.com | github.com/kylesnowschwartz
Applied AI Engineer I embed with engineering teams and make coding agents work for you
Profile
Software engineer with eleven years of experience. Since sending my first prompt to Claude Code, I’ve barely touched an IDE. When Envato opened its Claude Code beta in May 2025, I volunteered as an AI Champion, built the case for treating AI enablement as an engineering discipline, encouraged my team to treat Claude like a customizable operating system, and in March 2026 became a founding member of the AI Engineering team. My essay “Fault Lines in AI Engineering” helped shape the team’s charter. How I work: embed with teams, architect agentic workflows, coach, and measure impact.
Selected Engagements — AI Adoption & Enablement (Envato, 2025–Present)
Embedded coaching: a new data warehouse
The data team was starting a new data warehouse. I embedded with them for a month to coach AI-assisted workflows: 1-on-1 pairing sessions plus two hands-on workshops. The warehouse was built AI-first: agents generated the models from human-approved designs, then the team reconciled them row-for-row against the legacy warehouse. The team lead wrote: “The project has succeeded beyond all our expectations… it wouldn’t have been possible without your support and guidance.”
Platform: the internal plugin marketplace for coding agents
I architected Envato’s internal plugin marketplace for coding agents and am its top contributor of 21 domain-scoped plugins. In an org-wide survey of engineering, the most-used shared plugin reached 69% adoption amongst respondents, and other engineers now ship their own plugins into it. The CTO directed other engineers to me for MCP server guidance, and for help proving a tedious manual process could be automated with AI.
Workshops and community
I’ve run a Claude Code workshop series since August 2025 and a weekly AI Community of Practice. I built claude-code-hero, a training game where engineers ship their own working Claude Code plugin. My mantra is “show don’t tell.”
Requested engagements
IT Ops asked for help creating an AI API key naming standard covering Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Cursor; I co-developed it and built the naming wizard, launching it company-wide. The security team selected me as one of the org’s heaviest AI users to interview about safety and where to tighten controls, and later requested help developing a guardrail to prevent accidental commits to personal repos. And the Recast data team is still working AI-first months after my engagement ended, and will soon present the new approach to Snowflake, the data-platform vendor.
Engagements to strategy
My team decides what to build through discovery: hypothesis-driven proposals verified with spikes. I surveyed engineering org-wide, and my discovery proposal drawn from its results fed the team’s Key Results planning. I also presented Envato’s AI-engineering pedagogical approach to Shutterstock engineering (our parent company) in a cross-company session.
Quantified before/after impact
- I prototyped the consolidation of Envato’s four Dependabot-triage systems into two layers: an SLA tracker and an AI remediation pipeline. Along the way I replaced an LLM step with a deterministic one, cutting agent cost per dependency review by roughly 95% in live runs.
- The Dependabot CLI another team runs in their tech-support process today is built from a tool I wrote; their lead credits it with “significantly reducing the load on tech support.”
Experience
Engineer III | Envato (2021–Present)
Modernized a 15-year-old Rails marketplace serving millions of users (Rails 4.x through 7.x, zero-downtime). Our 12-month handover of the platform to a contracting team completed in under 8 months, in part due to AI-assisted workflows I helped introduce. From May 2025, focus shifted to the AI adoption and enablement work above.
Senior Developer → Team Lead | Flux Federation (2015–2021)
Built white-labelable software for energy retailers, progressing from developer to leading a cross‑functional team of eight: billing systems, permissions frameworks, and content management were among our remit. When Covid hit I managed the transition from a fully in-office to remote team, then deliberately stepped back from management to return to hands-on engineering.
OSS Projects
tail-claude — A Go Bubble Tea TUI for reading Claude Code session logs: see what Claude hides from you.
claude-code-hero — A training game that teaches Claude Code’s full surface (hooks, agents, plugins, MCP); you ship your own working plugin in a Dungeon-Crawler setting completely built on Claude Code’s runtime.
claude-bumper-lanes — Stay in the loop with a circuit-breaker that prevents unbounded changes, plus enforced review cadence and visual diffs of what Claude’s touched.
And more.
Stack
Claude Code plugin development · MCP servers · Harness engineering · Agentic workflows · Ruby-on-Rails · Go · Python · JavaScript · React · AWS · Terraform · Buildkite/GitHub Actions
Qualifications
# Kyle Snow Schwartz
## Profile
Software engineer with eleven years of experience. Since sending my first prompt to Claude Code, I've barely touched an IDE. When Envato opened its Claude Code beta in May 2025, I volunteered as an AI Champion, built the case for treating AI enablement as an engineering discipline, encouraged my team to treat Claude like a customizable operating system, and in March 2026 became a founding member of the AI Engineering team. My essay "Fault Lines in AI Engineering" helped shape the team's charter. How I work: embed with teams, architect agentic workflows, coach, and measure impact.
## Selected Engagements — AI Adoption & Enablement (Envato, 2025–Present)
### Embedded coaching: a new data warehouse
The data team was starting a new data warehouse. I embedded with them for a month to coach AI-assisted workflows: 1-on-1 pairing sessions plus two hands-on workshops. The warehouse was built AI-first: agents generated the models from human-approved designs, then the team reconciled them row-for-row against the legacy warehouse. The team lead wrote: "The project has succeeded beyond all our expectations… it wouldn't have been possible without your support and guidance."
### Platform: the internal plugin marketplace for coding agents
I architected Envato's internal plugin marketplace for coding agents and am its top contributor of **21 domain-scoped plugins**. In an org-wide survey of engineering, the most-used shared plugin reached **69% adoption** amongst respondents, and other engineers now ship their own plugins into it. The CTO directed other engineers to me for MCP server guidance, and for help proving a tedious manual process could be automated with AI.
### Workshops and community
I've run a Claude Code workshop series since August 2025 and a weekly AI Community of Practice. I built **claude-code-hero**, a training game where engineers ship their own working Claude Code plugin. My mantra is "show don't tell."
### Requested engagements
IT Ops asked for help creating an AI API key naming standard covering Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and Cursor; I co-developed it and built the naming wizard, launching it company-wide. The security team selected me as one of the org's heaviest AI users to interview about safety and where to tighten controls, and later requested help developing a guardrail to prevent accidental commits to personal repos. And the Recast data team is still working AI-first months after my engagement ended, and will soon present the new approach to Snowflake, the data-platform vendor.
### Engagements to strategy
My team decides what to build through discovery: hypothesis-driven proposals verified with spikes. I surveyed engineering org-wide, and my discovery proposal drawn from its results fed the team's Key Results planning. I also presented Envato's AI-engineering pedagogical approach to Shutterstock engineering (our parent company) in a cross-company session.
### Quantified before/after impact
- I prototyped the consolidation of Envato's four Dependabot-triage systems into two layers: an SLA tracker and an AI remediation pipeline. Along the way I replaced an LLM step with a deterministic one, cutting agent cost per dependency review by roughly **95%** in live runs.
- The Dependabot CLI another team runs in their tech-support process today is built from a tool I wrote; their lead credits it with "significantly reducing the load on tech support."
## Experience
### Engineer III | Envato (2021–Present)
Modernized a 15-year-old Rails marketplace serving millions of users (Rails 4.x through 7.x, zero-downtime). Our 12-month handover of the platform to a contracting team completed in under 8 months, in part due to AI-assisted workflows I helped introduce. From May 2025, focus shifted to the AI adoption and enablement work above.
### Senior Developer → Team Lead | Flux Federation (2015–2021)
Built white-labelable software for energy retailers, progressing from developer to leading a cross‑functional team of eight: billing systems, permissions frameworks, and content management were among our remit. When Covid hit I managed the transition from a fully in-office to remote team, then deliberately stepped back from management to return to hands-on engineering.
## OSS Projects
**[tail-claude](https://github.com/kylesnowschwartz/tail-claude)** — A Go Bubble Tea TUI for reading Claude Code session logs: see what Claude hides from you.
**[claude-code-hero](https://github.com/kylesnowschwartz/claude-code-hero)** — A training game that teaches Claude Code's full surface (hooks, agents, plugins, MCP); you ship your own working plugin in a Dungeon-Crawler setting completely built on Claude Code's runtime.
**[claude-bumper-lanes](https://github.com/kylesnowschwartz/claude-bumper-lanes)** — Stay in the loop with a circuit-breaker that prevents unbounded changes, plus enforced review cadence and visual diffs of what Claude's touched.
And more.
## Stack
Claude Code plugin development · MCP servers · Harness engineering · Agentic workflows · Ruby-on-Rails · Go · Python · JavaScript · React · AWS · Terraform · Buildkite/GitHub Actions