# Ye Myat Min (Jeff)

> Founding engineer at Chalkie AI, technical founder, software engineer, and writer. I write about software, AI, leadership, ambition, agency, and lessons from building companies.

## About

Ye Myat Min, who goes by Jeff, grew up in Myanmar and learned to code at twelve, mostly from books. He started Nexlabs while at university and eventually left to build it full-time. Nexlabs grew from a four-person development shop into a product studio; its 30-person engineering unit was acquired by Yoma Strategic Holdings in 2021.

Jeff also founded Better HR, a regional HR and payroll platform serving more than 100,000 employees across Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Vietnam. He later co-founded Peek, an AI-native expense journal used by more than 16,000 people in the United States.

He now works as a founding engineer at Chalkie AI, building AI tools that help teachers create classroom-ready lessons and learning materials. His work and writing focus on staying close to the craft while building companies and teams, acting under constraint, and being honest about the costs of ambition.

## Main pages

- [About](https://www.yemyat.com/): Background, current work, selected experience, values, and recent writing
- [Writing](https://www.yemyat.com/blog): The complete essay archive
- [RSS feed](https://www.yemyat.com/feed.xml): New essays in RSS format

## Essays

### AI and software

- [Setting up Claude Cowork for Personal Productivity](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/claude-cowork-setup): A step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Cowork so it remembers your people, projects, and shorthand.
- [The Coding-Agent Loop That Made Me Faster](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/coding-agent-loop): With coding agents, less is more. The limiting factor is the quality of your thinking.
- [Everyone Will Build Their Own Software (They Won't)](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/everyone-will-build-their-own-software): Why the claim that AI will make everyone build custom software ignores decades of evidence.
- [No One Is Building Their Own Software](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/no-one-is-building-their-own-software): Programming keeps getting easier, but most people still do not want to program.
- [We're All Prompt Addicts Now](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/prompt-addiction): LLMs promised to augment thinking but can easily become a substitute for it.

### Founders and operators

- [Claude Cowork Prompts for Agency Owners](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/cowork-prompts-agency-owners): Seven copy-paste scheduled tasks for client plans, scope alerts, retainer health, onboarding, and other agency workflows.
- [Claude Cowork Prompts for Startup Founders](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/cowork-prompts-startup-founders): Seven copy-paste scheduled tasks for metrics, ship logs, investor updates, inbox triage, and meeting debriefs.
- [Stop Looking at Competitors](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/stop-looking-at-competitors): When you study competitors, you inherit their assumptions.

### Agency and ambition

- [The Privilege Nobody Wants to Talk About](https://www.yemyat.com/blog/privilege-nobody-wants): Some people are born with choices. Others are born with consequences of choices they never made.

## Selected experience

- **Chalkie AI — Founding Engineer:** Building AI tools that help teachers create classroom-ready lessons and learning materials.
- **Peek — Co-founder and CPTO:** Built an AI-native expense journal, including its mobile app, backend, and multi-agent systems.
- **Bluejay Finance — Co-founder and COO (2022–2024):** Led operations, HR, and compliance for a crypto-backed stablecoin and peer-to-peer lending platform.
- **Better HR — Founder, board member, and fractional CTO:** Built a regional HR and payroll platform serving more than 100,000 employees across four countries.
- **Nexlabs — Founder and CEO:** Grew a four-person development shop into a product studio. Its 30-person engineering unit was acquired in 2021.

## Elsewhere

- Website: https://www.yemyat.com/
- Chalkie AI: https://chalkie.ai
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/yemyatmin
- GitHub: https://github.com/yemyat
- X: https://x.com/yemyat91