Software Engineer  ·  San Francisco Bay Area

Twenty-five years building software. Eleven years away. Building again.

I'm Young-Kyu Yoo. I spent 17 years at Intuit working on QuickBooks, ending as a Principal Software Engineer, on software used by millions of small businesses. I stepped away in 2014 for a family break. In 2026 I came back to full-time development and built four full-stack AI prototypes — the architecture, the data models, and the LLM interaction design, end to end.

4full-stack AI prototypes in 2026
80K+lines of TypeScript & JavaScript
25years of engineering experience
49KAI-written, human-reviewed dictionary clues
Recent Work · 2026

What I built this year

All four were built with Claude Code. Three were for product owners I partnered with; DEFINeD is my own. Each has real authentication, a real database, and a live deployment — I don't consider a prototype done until it runs in the world.

DEFINeD Arcade mode — falling word clues DEFINeD Final Boss — syllable word building
Personal product · Live

DEFINeD

A word-game platform with seven game modes and an AI-built 49,000-word lexicon.

Seven games — from Spelling-Bee-style honeycombs to syllable puzzles and typing games — built on reusable puzzle engines. Every one of ~49,000 lexicon words carries an AI-generated, human-reviewed dictionary clue, produced by a multi-model pipeline: Anthropic Batch API generation with GPT and Gemini cross-review.

Supabase backend with 21 versioned migrations covering auth, daily puzzles, leaderboards, head-to-head challenges, friends, and AI-powered custom word lists. Includes a SHARK2 gesture-typing swipe keyboard decoder and a daily puzzle system with server-authoritative dates, data versioning, and client cache invalidation.

React 18ViteSupabase IndexedDBVercelAnthropic · OpenAI · Gemini
Play it at playdefined.com →
SocratiQ analysis report screen (Korean)
Client project · School alpha

SocratiQ

An education app where students learn by debating Socrates.

Students reason through multi-turn Socratic dialogue with an LLM that probes and scaffolds rather than lectures, adapting to grade level. Fully bilingual (English / Korean) with voice input and output. Each session ends with an LLM-generated learning report — vocabulary, concepts, and logic — plus curated book recommendations drawn live from two Korean national library APIs.

Built as a pnpm monorepo with an adapter boundary that keeps shared packages region-neutral for future markets. Four LLM providers run behind a single interface with retry. Currently in alpha with a school in Korea.

React 18pnpm monorepoSupabase RLS Vercel serverlessWeb Speech API4 LLM providers
AI Lesson Lab — Lesson Workshop intake form
Client project

AI Lesson Lab

An AI lesson-craft studio for teachers, in English and Korean.

One intake — topic, grade, standard, duration — cascades into a lesson plan, worksheet, exit ticket, slide outline, and parent email that all share the same lesson context. Every output exports as a real PDF (server-rendered with full Hangul and math font coverage) or a real PowerPoint deck with speaker notes.

Supabase-backed lesson library with passwordless sign-in, row-level security, and public share links; AI picture-card generation for early-grade worksheets. The Korean edition encodes the 2022 revised national curriculum, standard lesson structure, and formal register switching per audience.

Next.jsTypeScriptClaude API (streaming) SupabaseTailwind CSSpdfkit · pptx export
Om Yum Yum — Kitchen world on iPad
Client project

Om Yum Yum

An iPad-first kids' app teaching cooking, yoga, and mindfulness.

Roughly 36,000 lines of TypeScript across a React 19 client and a separate content-authoring admin CMS. Kids progress through an eight-level apron journey, earn coins and stars, and collect themed activity cards — and reaching Master level plants a real tree through One Tree Planted.

Offline-first architecture: bundled content seeds IndexedDB on first launch, then delta-syncs from Supabase. Native iOS shell via Capacitor with camera-backed photo journaling, 16 versioned SQL migrations with row-level security, and five Deno Edge Functions including AI image generation.

React 19TypeScriptCapacitor (iOS) SupabaseIndexedDBZustand
Approach

How I work

Coming back after eleven years meant learning a new way to build. This is the method I've settled into.

Design docs for everything

Each repo carries a working library of design docs — backend architecture, data models, migration plans — kept current as the system evolves, so the AI works from a spec, not from vibes.

The right model for the job

DEFINeD's 49,000 dictionary clues were generated with Anthropic's Batch API, then cross-checked by GPT and Gemini, then reviewed by a human — me. Different models are good at different things; I use them accordingly.

Old habits, kept

Versioned migrations, row-level security, typed schemas, automated tests, and a second AI reviewing the first one's code before merge. The tools write faster than I ever did; the discipline is what keeps them honest.

Background

Three decades in software

2026 — Present

Independent Software Development

Full-stack AI application prototypes
  • Designed and built the four working prototypes above — architecture, data modeling, LLM interaction design, implementation, and testing — partnering with product owners on three.
2014 — 2025

Career Break

Planned family break
  • Eleven years focused on family. Started retooling in 2025 — modern web frameworks, LLM APIs — and was back to full-time development by early 2026.
1997 — 2014

Intuit

Software Engineer → Senior → Staff → Principal Software Engineer (2011) · QuickBooks — Mountain View, CA
  • Technical lead for QuickBooks Online for iPad, guiding it from early prototype to App Store launch.
  • Architect and technical lead for QuickBooks multicurrency — one of the largest engineering initiatives of its release cycle, delivered with a cross-functional team of about a dozen — engineers, QA, UX design, and product management.
  • Replaced QuickBooks' binary floating-point money math with an IEEE 754R-compliant decimal implementation, improving financial precision across the product.
  • Chief steward of the reporting and financial-transaction query engines; ported both to SQL Anywhere and shipped QuickBooks' first drag-and-drop feature.
1989 — 1997

The NeXTSTEP Years

Adamation · Filoli Information Systems — Bay Area, CA
  • Started my career writing Objective-C on the NeXT platform: technical lead for Adamation's commercial contact-management software, then modules of a workers'-compensation claims system at Filoli.
Education: B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, where I also completed the requirements for a second B.A. in English Literature, followed by graduate study in English Literature at UC Berkeley.

Get in touch

I'm open to full-time and contract roles where experienced product engineering and AI-assisted development are both useful. Email is the fastest way to reach me.