About

I'm Anthony Wentzel, founder of Pineapples. I embed with teams and take software from an ambiguous problem to production: discovery, scoping, build, deploy, operate. I've been running that loop for twenty years.

Along the way: telemetry visualization for NASA, AmericanIdol.com for Fox at more than 60 million concurrent users, and co-founding Freebird, a nationwide rides platform that raised $12M. I've been building conversational agents since 2014, on Dialogflow, long before LLMs made it a category.

What the git history says

My GitHub account dates back to 2010, and reading back through it for this site, a few threads run through all of it:

• Mobile, early and often. Objective-C in 2014, React Native at Freebird from 2016, Expo ever since. I've patched more native modules than I'd like to admit.
• Infrastructure as part of the product. Per-branch preview environments in 2017, CI that only builds what changed, webhook pipelines that never drop an event.
• Agents, before and after LLMs. Intent maps and fulfillment webhooks in 2018; MCP gateways, model routers, and guardrailed custom agents today. The shapes rhyme more than you'd think.
• Fail loudly. From a React Native promise that never resolved to agent runs with hard budgets and deadlines, the rule is the same: if something can't finish, it should say so.

Now

At Pineapples we build production agentic systems: explicit tool schemas, eval-gated retrieval, traced agents that fail loudly and recover, plus the React and Expo apps that put them in people's hands. Recent open-source work includes Harbormaster, an MCP gateway that keeps context cost constant no matter how many tools sit behind it.

I write about what we learn on the blog.

TypeScript · Python · React / React Native / Expo · Claude and OpenAI APIs · MCP · pgvector · Postgres · AWS · Vercel