About Zak El Fassi

I’m Zak El Fassi. I started building on the Moroccan web in the early 2000s, before social software had a playbook. I later worked at Google and spent five years at Meta across developer platforms, identity, analytics, Instagram, and messaging partnerships.

Today I build from Oakland.

My oldest active product is Talk & Comment, a voice layer for the web that has been alive since 2013. My newest work is agent-native: software systems that can carry real operating load, preserve institutional memory, recover from failure, and show their work. Between them sits the question I keep returning to:

How do we keep human judgment legible while machines take on more execution?

For a teacher, judgment is the difference between hearing a student and scoring an assignment. For a founder, it is knowing which problem deserves another year. Inside an organization, it is the part of the work that never made it into the process document but still determines whether the process succeeds.

I build systems around that part.

What I’m building

Talk & Comment began as voice comments for the internet. Teachers kept it alive during remote school when almost everything else around it went quiet. That history still governs the product: spoken feedback carries tone, effort, and care that a text box often removes. The current platform turns voice into usable learning and assessment workflows without erasing the person behind it.

DebuggingReality builds operating systems for expert organizations. The work is practical: identify where judgment lives, make the workflow observable, give agents bounded responsibilities, and leave humans in control of decisions that require consent, taste, or accountability.

I also co-founded INK + PORCELAIN with my wife. It is a design-commerce studio for rare art and one-of-a-kind objects. I build the commerce, supply-chain, and operating systems behind it.

Around those products is a working lab: open-source build loops, agent observability tools, communication experiments, research protocols, and the remains of projects that taught me something before they closed. The full register lives in the Labs.

How I work with agents

I run agents in production every day. They have named scopes, tools, memory, tests, escalation paths, and explicit boundaries. When one fails, the failure has to be visible. When one changes a system, the evidence has to survive the session that produced it.

This has changed the shape of my work. I spend less time performing every step and more time defining what must remain true: the acceptance test, the trust boundary, the rollback path, the part no machine gets to decide. The code matters. The operating system around the code matters more than it used to.

I publish what survives contact with real users, production systems, money, regulation, and exhaustion. The failures are usually more useful than the demos.

Why I write

Writing is how I keep decisions from disappearing into shipped code.

Some essays are field notes from live systems. Others move through memory, sovereignty, consciousness, theology, family, and the politics hidden inside technical choices. The operating notes owe the reader evidence. The inquiries sometimes end with a better question.

The public essays are complete pieces. The Workshop holds the work while it is still becoming: annotations, alternate versions, working notes, correspondence, and book manuscripts. The shelf holds the writing that outgrew the blog.

Where I come from

Morocco is the first coordinate. I learned the web through Moroccan communities and early products such as Concep.ma, PeaceAndLol, WannaJo.in, JobFinder, and Send.ma. Then came an MSc in Computer Science, Google, and Meta.

I left Meta in 2021 after burning out and watching a startup copy my side project word for word, then raise a Sequoia round while I could not compete from inside a large company. Going back outside was not tidy, but it made the work mine again.

Talk & Comment survived long stretches of neglect and more than one near-death. That endurance taught me more about product work than a clean success story could have. Software becomes real when people keep finding a use for it after your original story about it has expired.

I live in the Oakland hills with my wife and our son, Atlas. I’m a board member of the Africa Deep Tech Foundation.

Start somewhere

• If you are new here, Start here.
• If you want the products, tools, methods, and compost, enter the Labs.
• If you came to read, begin with the Essays.
• If you want to work together, read Work With Me.
• If you want the work in your inbox, join the newsletter.

Short bio

Zak El Fassi is a Moroccan systems engineer, founder of Talk & Comment, and former Meta messaging partnerships lead. He builds voice tools, agent operating systems, and infrastructure for expert organizations, then writes field notes from inside the work.

For a specific question, introduction, or piece of work, email [email protected]. I read everything and reply when I have something useful to say.