I’m Todd McCaffrey. I was born in April 1956, I’m American, and I live in Letterkenny, County Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland, which is where most of what’s on this site gets made.
I wrote my first program in 1974 and I’ve been writing them since, which is fifty-two years and counting; this site is a Python file and a folder of Markdown because by now I know exactly how little machinery a thing needs. I hold a BSc (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin, though the College of Technology on Bolton Street is the place I think of as my alma mater, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in California. In 2026, at seventy, I finished an MSc in Cyberpsychology at ATU Letterkenny with a Second Class Honours, Grade 1, and a mark of 89 in AI and Ethical Responsibility, which is the module that this site’s Views section grew out of.
Between the engineering and the degrees I wrote books: more than seventy novels under a few names, some of them New York Times bestsellers, and I still write them. I hold a private pilot’s licence, which is why the Space section exists and why a rocket engine is sitting over in Interactive. I speak some Irish, which is why nearly everything I build has a name in it.
What I do now is build a small stack of cognitive-architecture tools, mostly alone, mostly on a few GPUs in a house in Donegal: a memory system, a reasoning gateway, a preprint monitor, a transformer you can see inside, a growing ladder of small models, a labour-market model of Ireland, a civic bill-watcher. And I write about what they are and are not, which is the view this site is named for.
I call myself a polymath because the alternative is listing all of that every time, and because the useful thinking happens where the fields meet. The novelist knows things about minds the engineer doesn’t; the pilot knows things about trust the psychologist doesn’t; and the person who has done all of it for long enough is allowed, I think, to have a view.
Elsewhere: aihi.win for the state of the projects, glassformer.com for GlassBox, sionnach.ie for the showcase, foxxelabs.ie for the lab, Stór for the books, and GitHub for the code.
Mail: todd@anseo.irish.