Ryan Saxe

Skip to content

Projects7

pair: commands in a terminal, and a decision page with a comment thread in the browser

Pair programming, now that your agent writes the code.

2026Works on desktop and phone

A sunlit village with a mill and a stone tower, rendered by Gaia from a codebase

Gaia

Turns a codebase into a world you can walk through.

2026TypeScript and a Rust engine

The front page of my edition of The Nightly Build on November 8, 2026

The Nightly Build

Turns a GitHub repository into a personal newspaper that an AI writes and publishes.

2026326 articles published

An agent’s edit, flagged by byor’s post-edit hook and then fixed

byor

Custom code rules for the conventions your linter won’t enforce.

2026Runs in editors, CI and agents

Diagram: a set of cards goes into one shared encoder, which narrows from 512 to 256 to 128 numbers; four heads read those numbers for recommendations, draft picks, deck building and card correlations

CubeCobra ML system

The machine learning system behind CubeCobra’s draft bots and card recommendations.

2020–2026100k monthly users

MTG drafting AI

A transformer that drafts and builds decks in Magic: The Gathering.

2021–2022Peaked at #27 in Mythic

A battle in Goldfish mode: each player has two creatures, three lands, a Treasure and a poison counter on a green table

Crucible

A Magic: The Gathering format inspired by roguelikes and autobattlers.

2026Play online or in paper

Writing8

Figure: linear models nested inside GLMs, GAMs and neural networks

Designing Transparent Neural Networks

Neural networks designed to be as transparent as linear and additive models.

Mar 2021Essay

Figure: a small neural network with inputs x1 to xN

From Linear Models to Neural Networks

How neural networks work, explained with only the math of linear models.

Mar 2021Essay

Draft Navigation: From Picks To Paths, on StarCityGames

StarCityGames

Over 400 articles about Magic: The Gathering, written from 2016 to 2022.

2016–2022Columnist

The 540

I co-hosted 14 episodes of StarCityGames’ Cube podcast with Ryan Overturf.

2021–2022Co-host

The Lords of Limited podcast cover

Lords of Limited

Three guest episodes: drafting with preferences, drafting aggro and bot design.

2017–2019First repeat guest

The Limited Level-Ups podcast cover

Limited Level-Ups

Why “forcing” in draft gets a bad name, and the art of doing it well.

2020–20245 episodes

The Lucky Paper Radio podcast cover

Lucky Paper Radio

What low-powered cubes can learn from how Limited sets are designed.

2023–2024Cube design

Draftsim’s title card for Bot Drafting the Hard Way, by Ryan Saxe

Bot Drafting the Hard Way

A bot, built from over 80,000 drafts, that understands archetypes and stays open.

Jan 2020Bot design