About

I'm Brad Leclerc — professional geek, based in Ottawa, Canada. I build things, break things, and write about both.

The tech side

Right now I'm running SkeinScribe, an interactive fiction platform built on the Claude API, and doing independent research into how AI safety systems actually behave versus how they're designed to. The two are related — building a platform that needs predictable AI content generation is how I ended up systematically mapping the ways it's unpredictable.

My background is cross-disciplinary and mostly self-taught. Early employee at Shopify (pre-IPO, left in 2015 for "became a dad and needed sleep" reasons), built CMS infrastructure in Python for a startup, freelance tech and entertainment writer, and I've spent an unreasonable amount of time studying offensive security concepts because it turns out "how do things fail?" is the most interesting question you can ask about almost anything. The common thread is a pattern of learning whatever a problem needs and applying it until the problem is solved or becomes a more interesting problem.

Beyond the screen

I'm a certified whiskey sommelier with a collection that stopped being reasonable a while ago. What started as "I like scotch" turned into years of... well, autistic hyperfocus I suppose. I had a whisky YouTube channel called Cask Strength for a while and I've been a guest on Whiskey Tribe a few times. I also have strong opinions about people who gatekeep whisky by telling newcomers they're drinking it wrong — those people are the worst part of the hobby and I will die on this hill.

I practice aikido and bartitsu — yes, the Victorian martial art Sherlock Holmes used. Bartitsu combines boxing, jiu-jitsu, cane fighting, and savate into a weirdo combo of things that somehow works out. There's a life metaphor in there someplace probably. I walk with a cane, so the cane-fighting part is... let's say, not a coincidence. More broadly I'm drawn to martial arts that emphasize redirection and control over brute force, which probably says something about my engineering philosophy too if you think about it for more than five seconds.

Then there's recreational lockpicking. Same itch as offensive security research: understanding how systems work by figuring out how they fail. Plus it's meditative in a way that staring at a screen isn't, and it makes me very fun at parties (this is a lie... I don't go to parties).

The through line

If there's a pattern across all of this — AI, whiskey, martial arts, locks, security — it's that I'm happiest when I'm figuring out how something actually works under the surface, especially when the answer turns out to be different from what everyone assumes. I've been writing online since the LiveJournal days, and the impulse hasn't changed: poke at the thing, understand the thing, tell people what you found. For a look at the chaos in between, there's always TikTok.

I work remote and async. I'm direct, I don't do gatekeeping, and I'd rather have an honest conversation than a polite one.

Work with me

I'm available for AI red-teaming, prompt architecture, content moderation design, and product consulting. If you're building something on top of LLMs and want someone who's already shipped a product through the hard parts, I can probably help.

See what I offer → Get in touch →