Software Engineer
Drew has spent 15 years writing software across an unusually wide range of machines — from powertrain components at Rekluse Motor Sports to industrial robotics at VersaBuilt, where he rose from developer to Director of Software Engineering over nearly eight years in Boise. He moved to the Bay Area in 2021 for Courier, working on developer infrastructure and reaching Staff Software Engineer, and studied Computer Science at Boise State along the way.
Since 2025 he’s been a software engineer at OpenAI in San Francisco.
Mid-tier models match frontier ones on classification, extraction, and routing, where outputs are small and checkable. Frontier models still lead on open-ended reasoning, long-horizon planning, and code that must run first time. Choose per task class, prove it with an eval suite, and set a review date, because prices and capabilities move monthly.
Measuring a coding assistant's impact means tracking delivery outcomes at the team level rather than usage counts. Lines accepted measures adoption, not value. Vendor productivity percentages come from studies that rarely resemble your team. DORA's four keys measure the system, stay safe to publish, and require a baseline captured before rollout.
Model routing selects which model handles each request, usually to cut cost or latency. The router itself is a component: it adds a decision before every call, with its own latency and failure mode. Heuristic routing on input length or declared task type is cheapest; every model added to the table widens the evaluation surface.
An IDE extension and an MCP server for the same vendor cover different callers. The extension gives a developer a visual surface to browse, search and upload assets; the server exposes those same operations to a model as callable tools that cost context. Only the server's configuration is committable, which makes it the team-level decision.
A vendor-published skill pack is instruction text a team installs once into a repository so every assistant answers from the vendor's documented patterns instead of recall. Cloudinary's pack installs with one npx command, offers four selectable skills, and is versioned by the vendor, so assistant behaviour changes without a review step.