Portrait of Alex Chen

Alex Chen

Languages, tools, and the notes between them

I design small languages and the CLIs that keep them honest. Currently at Harbor Labs, previously on the typechecker for a research notebook that got out of hand in the best way.

San Francisco

Now

Building Ink, a typed notebook format for people who write with code sitting next to the sentence. Harbor is the CLI around it — evals, snapshots, and a boringly reliable local workflow.

GitHub

harbor-labs/ink

A typed notebook format. Prose, code, and tests in one file that still diffs like a human wrote it.

TypeScript · local-first

GitHub

harbor-labs/harbor

The CLI for Ink: run, snapshot, and compare notebooks without standing up a service.

Rust · CLI
Types as documentation — Northshore ConfTalk notes and slides

Writing

Occasional notes on type systems that stay out of the way, local-first tools, and why most developer portfolios look like résumé PDFs with extra steps.

Write to AlexSlow email, real replies.