650 participants. 100 mentors. 305 submissions. 7 finalists. One tool underneath all of it: Glass. A single week-long company-wide AI hackathon perfectly encapsulates the impact I had at Ramp.
I joined Ramp as a frontend lead on the Payments team, shipping features across billing, rewards, delinquency, bank linking, and the launch of Ramp’s stablecoin product. But the work that defined my time there was Glass, our internal AI workspace. It’s the reason nearly the entire company, around 99%, uses AI every day, and the reason a hackathon like that was even possible.
Ramp had pushed AI hard, but most people had quietly hit a ceiling. The setup that separates a casual user from a power user, things like terminal commands, local installs, and connecting tools by hand, was out of reach for anyone who wasn’t already an engineer. The models were already good enough. What most people lacked was a way in.
Glass fixed that. You sign in once and every tool the company runs on is connected and ready, with no setup and nothing to configure. It began as a prototype from a product manager who wanted to see if a coding agent could be useful to people who would never open a terminal. I came on and rewrote it into a real product, owning the architecture, the interface, and the systems underneath. An infrastructure engineer made sure it landed on everyone’s machines and stayed connected. We were a small group, the product was already in people’s hands, and we shipped improvements daily.
As Glass took off, my first focus was keeping its pace sustainable. The codebase was growing faster than anyone could track, so I built a shared component library and design token system. Every new screen inherited a single visual language instead of being rebuilt from scratch, which kept the product coherent even as we shipped features daily.
I also rebuilt how Glass connects to the dozen or more services it depends on. Instead of opening a fresh connection to every tool each time you started a chat, I built a layer that holds one live connection per service open for the life of the app and hands each session a lightweight wrapper on top. Startup time dropped from about 45 seconds to roughly 2.
The impact went beyond the numbers. Glass passed a thousand daily users, but what stuck with me was watching how people changed. Non-engineers became builders overnight. I watched a sales rep build a skill that wiped out hours of tedious research per week and then share it across the entire company in a single click. I watched people light up with a kind of childlike wonder when they realized they could finally build the tools they had always wanted and never had. That is the part I will remember.
I’ve since left Ramp to build something of my own: a shared workspace where people, their tools, and AI can get work done together as a team. Take a look at my Founder page if you want to hear more or would like to become a design partner.
