Franklin Dickinson

Founder · Monomoy Studios
Cornell Tech · M.Eng. CS '26 · 3.9 GPA
New York, NY
Meta Platforms, Civis Analytics
Dartmouth College · BA
US Citizen

Eight years measuring what was true at Meta and Civis. Now running Monomoy Studios, a one-person product studio built on AI coding agents.

The main bet is Fogo, an AI money companion that knows what it doesn't know, live at askfogo.com after a three-month solo sprint. The first shot on goal beside it is The House Remembers, a painted family book made from the photos already in your family's group text.

Monomoy Studios

One person, several shots on goal, one main bet. Monomoy Studios is how I work now: a product studio where I do the product thinking, the design, the engineering, and the go-to-market myself, with AI coding agents running in parallel lanes so a single builder can ship what used to take a team.

The studio has a shape. One main bet gets the months and the full engineering discipline. Around it, small shots on goal get days: an idea gets built end to end, put in front of real people, and either earns more time or gets written up and shelved. The eight years of measurement work at Meta and Civis are what decide which is which.

The studio is named after Monomoy, the barrier island off Chatham on Cape Cod. It reshapes itself storm by storm and is sometimes joined to the mainland and sometimes not, which is the right picture for a studio that rebuilds itself around whatever it is currently making.

Fogo and The House Remembers were both built between June and September 2026. The earlier work further down is from the M.Eng. year.

Main bet

Fogo

AI money companion. Live at askfogo.com. Three months full-time, launch candidate.

Shot on goal

The House Remembers

A painted family book from the photos in your family's group text. Edition 01 at the printer; founding editions open.

Spikes

Monomoy Relay · pinlist · Build Atlas

Send a small purpose-built interface instead of a document. Make a Facebook rental listing an addressable object. A loopback-only hub that keeps work intent visible after branches disappear.

The main bet: Fogo

AI money companion · live in production

Know where you stand.
Fogo has a yesterday, and nothing to sell you.

Every finance app reads the ledger. Fogo reads the decisions behind it. It connects to your accounts, gets the transactions right, remembers why you made the calls you made, and tells you "you can afford this" or "I don't know." It never nudges, never sells, and never states a number it can't back.

I built the first version during my M.Eng. After graduation I gave it a full-time sprint. The product went from a working AI budget app to a system with a real epistemology: every figure Fogo speaks carries what kind of claim it is, how Fogo knows it, and whether it may enter a total.

Helping you decide and measuring the decision are the same act. From the Fogo product thesis
June – August 2026, solo
3,400+
commits in 92 days
1,160+
pull requests merged
12,000+
automated tests, backend and frontend
30
Ask Fogo tools, read and write
267
database migrations, cloud-first
43
production surfaces audited on mobile
What the sprint built
Epistemics

The epistemic gateway

One envelope governs what Fogo may assert. Every figure carries a modality (actual, target, ceiling, projected), a basis, and a provenance tier from posted transaction down to user-stated. A reply validator checks each sentence before it ships. "Unknown" is a real answer and is never replaced by an estimate.

Decisions

Decision memory and the belief ledger

Recommendations are contracts: a brief, a ratification, a receipt. Beliefs get dated ends, not just starts. An outcome loop measures whether Fogo was right and says when the score can't fail. The month-end review checks in on the plan you actually accepted.

The person

Coverage of the life, not just the money

Five money flows can't tell Fogo your age, your income's character, or the raise that lands in March. The person layer makes Fogo say what it doesn't know about you before it answers, and cited guidance packs on retirement tax and real estate carry jurisdiction and basis.

Narrative

Page-scoped narrative and generative UI

A surface registry gives each page its own register: Budget, Months, Transactions, and the Calendar as temporal home. Narrative claims are grounded ensembles rendered from a registry of generative components, paused when the page is inactive, and measured when they're wrong.

Quality

Agents that QA the agent

Ember crawls the deployed app nightly with Playwright, judges each page with Claude vision, files GitHub issues, and runs an auto-fix lane. A persona dogfood runner replays scripted lives every night. Launch confidence is a locked ten-journey gate; FogoBench is the private model-comparison bench behind it.

Front door

Reveal, Arcade, and an agent surface

Connect one card and see your picture in about 60 seconds, no account needed. Three phone-first games for sharing. Manual import from PDF, image, or paste. Household mode where private money leaves the co-viewer's ledger. A read-only MCP surface that answers other AI agents with epistemic states.

Solo, AI-native

Two coding-agent lanes (Claude Code and Codex) in parallel worktrees, a work-streams register to keep them from colliding, and a nightly QA agent filing issues. About 37 commits a day for three months.

Cloud-first, launch-gated

One production database, additive-only migrations applied from merged code, idempotent write paths across every mutation, and a launch contract that lists the evidence each surface owes before it ships.

Thesis before features

The product rules are written down and enforced in code and evals: no engagement counter, no shame, no nudges, speak only when it matters. The thesis folder is the tiebreaker for every roadmap and copy decision.

Shot on goal: The House Remembers

Painted family book · Edition 01 at the printer

Every vacation becomes a chapter.
An edited book you never designed.

A hardcover, coffee-table book of your family's summers, painted from your own photographs, one chapter per season. The family takes part over the group text it already has: everyone answers one prompt, one steward says what feels right, and every person approves their own words and their own face before anything prints.

Each painting is made from one photograph under a fidelity rule. The photo controls identity, expression, gaze, pose, and where things sit. The painting may change brushwork, palette, and light. It may not reshape, beautify, or invent a face. One hand holds the style for the whole series, which is what makes forty pictures read as one book instead of forty filters.

I built Edition 01 for my own family over four days of a vacation at the house it is about, then wrote down the business: what is proven elsewhere, the one claim that is better, and the one idea that is new enough to quarantine and test on its own.

Your family already has the photographs. This turns them into a place you can return to. Product direction, September 2026
Edition 01 · Back to Chatham · Summer 2026
4
days, from first entry to press-ready files
56
pages, 8 by 10, hardcover, layflat keepsake
40
paintings, one hand, gouache
75
provenance records: source hash, prompts, approvals
1
steward; every reader a voice, one hand on the book
0
accounts, forms, or new apps for the family
How it works
Intake

The group text is the product surface

No app to adopt. One relative acts as steward and invites everyone over the thread that already exists. Each person gets one light prompt and answers by speaking, writing, or sending a photo. Nothing is seen until they choose to share it.

Paint

A painting pipeline with provenance

Photos go through a Claude painting pipeline under the fidelity rule and one series-wide art direction. Every painting gets a provenance record: source hash, prompts, comparisons against the source, approvals, and the editions it appears in. Anything that drifted gets repainted.

Edit

Taste encoded as edit verbs

The book is one template; a chapter supplies only data. Every instruction a family actually gave ("start with that photo", "put these two together", "shorter caption", "keep the maps facing") became a verb the tool can do. Field notes and the ledger generate themselves from the edition's own data.

Review

A shared edition with no accounts

One book, several hands. Every move, reword, name, like, note, and suggestion is an append-only entry in a shared log. A steward token holds pages; an edit across a held page becomes a suggestion instead. Each contributor approves their own words and can withhold print permission for their face.

Press

Preflight that refuses bad pages

Masters upscaled to twice working size, bleed and safe zones set, fonts embedded, colors soft-proofed against the press profile, night pages lifted because ink prints darker. A preflight script refuses any page that breaks the standard. A cheap proof first, then the layflat keepsake.

Business

Proven, better, new

Proven: prompted memories into print, photo-book vendors, portrait painters, layflat printing. Better: a real edited book you never designed. New and quarantined: repainted faces of people you love. The next test is one memory and one painting for a family that is not mine, before another print run.

What is defensible

Printing is a commodity. The moat is upstream of the PDF: source-fidelity rules, a book about a place with field notes and lore, a recurring chapter series, and a growing list of edit verbs that encode a family's taste.

The ladder

I do everything for my own family. Then a steward directs and I facilitate. Then the steward drives the tool and I review only faces and print safety. Product only once the edit-verb list stops growing, after three to five editions for families that aren't mine.

Where it is

Edition 01, 56 pages, is at the proof stage. A private, unlisted family site carries the book and its guestbook. Founding editions are made a few at a time and priced by conversation. Public examples use place and object studies only; family paintings stay private until each family says otherwise.

Earlier work

Experience & education

Jun 2026 – Present

Monomoy Studios

Founder · one-person product studio
New York, NY · askfogo.com

Product studio, full-time since graduation. Main bet: Fogo, an AI money companion live in production (FastAPI, React, PostgreSQL, Claude, Langfuse, Plaid). First shot on goal: The House Remembers, a painted family book.

  • –Shipped 3,400+ commits and 1,160+ merged pull requests in three months, running parallel AI coding-agent lanes as a solo developer
  • –Designed the epistemic gateway: a claim ontology (modality, basis, provenance tier) plus a reply validator, so Fogo never states a figure it can't back and treats "unknown" as a legal answer
  • –Built the decision layer: recommendation contracts and briefs, decision memory, and a belief ledger with an outcome loop that scores whether Fogo was right
  • –Stood up agentic QA: Ember (nightly Playwright crawl, Claude-vision review, GitHub issues, auto-fix lane), a persona dogfood runner, a ten-journey launch gate, and FogoBench
  • –Opened Fogo's public front door: Reveal (connect a card, see your picture in about 60 seconds), Fogo Arcade, PWA install, household mode, and a read-only MCP surface for AI agents
  • –Built The House Remembers in four days: a photo-to-gouache painting pipeline with per-painting provenance, a shared no-account edition log, a press pipeline with preflight, and a 56-page Edition 01 at the proof stage
Epistemic AI Agentic QA Shots on goal Solo production
Aug 2025 – May 2026

Cornell Tech

M.Eng. Computer Science · 3.9 GPA · graduated May 2026
New York, NY · Certificate in AI for Engineering

M.Eng. focused on the modern AI stack: generative modeling, ML engineering, and trustworthy AI.

  • –Solo-built the first version of Fogo, a production AI personal finance companion, from design through deployment
  • –Won 1st place at Empire Hacks (Cornell Tech AI Society) with Glassbox: AI transparency tooling for medical diagnostics, out of 30+ teams
Generative modeling Trustworthy AI ML Engineering 1st place, Empire Hacks
Mar 2022 – May 2025

Meta Platforms

Data Scientist, Product Analytics
New York, NY
Public Affairs · 2022–2023

Embedded data scientist for Public Affairs, working with the Public Affairs Marketing and Survey and Demography Science teams on causal measurement, marketing analytics, and media data products.

  • –Quantified 18–28pp brand health lift from messaging campaigns using regression adjustment and diff-in-diff
  • –Designed a 7-cohort experiment to identify brand advocates on-platform, surfacing a segment with 5x the response rate of the general population
  • –Helped build Headline Metrics, an ML text classification system for tracking news on and off platform: co-specced and prototyped it, PM'd the build, and readied it for production before handing it to data engineering. It replaced the org's manual topic tracking and became the company standard for 5+ teams
Survey Platform · 2023–2025

Embedded data scientist for the Survey Platform and Viewpoints teams: ran experiments, investigated falling survey start rates as liaison to the Survey and Demography Science researchers, and handled SEVs. Owned the data layer, partnering with PM, data engineers, and software engineers.

  • –Built the experimentation infrastructure from scratch, defined metrics, and ran A/B tests on the onboarding funnel, driving +2.9% first login
  • –Root-caused multiple verification and onboarding regressions by segmenting cohorts across the user funnel and correlating against deployment timelines; escalated reproduction reports that unblocked engineering
  • –Owned impact analyses for product and change-management decisions, quantifying how platform changes would affect the survey data researchers depend on
Experimentation at scale Causal inference ML platform development Root cause analysis
Aug 2018 – Jan 2022

Civis Analytics

Senior Applied Data Scientist, Politics
Washington, D.C.

Political data science consultancy. Applied research work: forecasting state legislative races, running advertising experiments at national scale, and delivering findings directly to clients.

  • –Led district-level forecasting for state legislative races: translated opinion models into client-ready insights and delivered findings across election cycles, including building the data pipelines
  • –Ran A/B tests on national-scale political advertising programs. Prediction errors had direct electoral consequences.
Election forecasting Political ad testing Client delivery Client management
Oct 2016 – Mar 2018

QuanticMind

Revenue Intelligence Analyst
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Embedded analytics at a paid search ML startup (SEM).

  • –Owned CRM data infrastructure and built lead scoring models from LinkedIn data
  • –Managed sales forecasting covering every revenue function: sales, marketing, SDRs, and AEs
Lead scoring Sales forecasting CRM analytics Paid search
Sep 2012 – Jun 2016

Dartmouth College

BA, Government & Anthropology
Modified with Economics · Hanover, NH

Cross-disciplinary foundation built across Government, Anthropology, and Economics.

  • –Grounding in political systems, cultural analysis, and economic reasoning through both quantitative and qualitative research methods
  • –Study abroad at the London School of Economics and University of Auckland
Political economy LSE exchange Quantitative methods Cross-disciplinary

AI for Engineering

Cornell Tech · M.Eng. Computer Science · 2025–2026

◆ AI / ML systems
Machine Learning EngineeringMiniTorch · CUDA kernels
+
Built end-to-end ML pipelines covering data ingestion, training, model deployment, and production monitoring. Left with a practical framework for shipping models that hold up outside the Jupyter notebook.
MiniTorchAutogradCUDANumbaGPU optimizationModel deployment
Generative ModelingDiffusion · VAE · GAN · RLHF
+
Implemented diffusion models, VAEs, and GANs from mathematical foundations up, gaining hands-on fluency with the architectures behind modern AI image and text generation. Goes beyond using these systems to understanding how they actually work.
VAEGANDiffusionFlow matchingRLHFSFTDPOKTOMistral 7B
Language ModelingTransformers · tokenization · LLM eval
+
Built and evaluated the core systems behind AI assistants, coding agents, and search: from tokenization and model design through task formulation and real-world evaluation. Gives me the depth to reason about LLM architecture decisions, not just prompt-engineer on top of them.
LLMsTokenizationTask formulationEvaluationArchitectures
Deep LearningCNNs · transformers
+
Implemented CNNs, RNNs, and transformer architectures from scratch in PyTorch, training neural networks on real datasets across vision and language tasks. The foundational course that made every other part of the AI stack legible.
PyTorchCNNsRNNsTransformersComputer visionNLP
Computer Systems & ArchitectureCPU architecture · ML inference
+
Studied how software runs on hardware at the processor level: memory hierarchies, instruction pipelines, and performance optimization. Directly informs how I reason about latency, throughput, and cost when designing ML inference systems.
Memory hierarchiesInstruction pipelinesLatencyThroughputPerformance
◆ AI safety & responsibility
Trustworthy AIGCG jailbreak · PGD attacks
+
Built and attacked ML models against adversarial inputs, privacy exploits, and fairness failures, learning both how to construct robust systems and exactly how they break. Shmatikov's security-researcher lens on AI now shapes every product risk call I make.
FGSMPGDGCG jailbreakAdversarial robustnessMachine unlearningRL alignment
AI Law & PolicyEU AI Act · AntiManipulate.me
+
Analyzed the legal and regulatory landscape governing AI deployment: from the EU AI Act to liability doctrine to data privacy frameworks. Lets me have real conversations with legal and compliance teams about what AI products can actually ship.
EU AI ActAI liabilityData privacyManipulation taxonomyRegulatory compliance
Ethical Decision MakingNormative reasoning
+
Applied normative ethics frameworks to real business cases, building structured approaches to the "should we build this" questions that come up constantly in AI product work. Moves ethical reasoning from gut instinct to defensible argument.
Ethics frameworksCase analysisProduct ethics
Product & entrepreneurship
Product StudioML for medical diagnostics
+
Led the ML modeling track on a cross-functional team with medical researchers, building a machine learning system for novel blood coagulation testing and validating the approach with physicians. Real product work: clinical use case identification, stakeholder alignment, and a path to market.
ML modelingMedical AICross-functionalStakeholder management
Startup StudioFirst CMO · brand identity agent
+
Building an AI product from scratch with a cross-disciplinary team, running customer discovery interviews and opportunity sizing before writing a line of code.Worked on Project Zeta, exploring AI solutions in digital marketing.
Customer discoveryOpportunity sizingAI productGo-to-market
Early AdoptersGTM · customer acquisition
+
Developed and tested real customer acquisition strategies for early-stage products, including actual outreach, contract structures, and system designs for landing first customers. Operationalizes the gap between "people say they want this" and "people will pay for this."
Customer acquisitionOutreachContract designEarly-stage growth