i’m gabe, a 0 -> 1 full-stack builder who likes finding the representation that makes messy problems tractable, then turning that into real products and systems.
from ~march 2025 until ~early january 2026, i built blocksmith ai: the only 3d ai app that can generate and texture 3d block style models (think Minecraft). see below for more details.
on january 12 2026 i joined Meshy AI as an engineer, i have the pleasure of working with an incredible team to help Meshy grow and maintain its position in the market as the #1 3d model generator. i think our future is incredibly bright! lots of interesting and challenging problems to be solved, a huge base of creators and customers to be served, and some competition in the market to keep things interesting.
outside of building and working, i’m likely hanging with my wife either eating sushi, ballroom dancing, or tiring out our mini aussie.
my strongest pattern is taking messy inputs and finding the abstraction that makes the problem easier to reason about.
user feedback, domain constraints, adjacent tools, technical limitations, and random conversations all tend to mix together until a simpler representation of the problem starts to emerge. once i find that representation, i like to build quickly, test it against reality, and keep evolving it as new constraints show up.
blocksmith is the clearest example. it started as an image-to-voxel prototype because that seemed like the obvious path. feedback from hytopia developers made it clear that voxel models were not actually the right representation for minecraft/hytopia-style assets. that pushed me to rethink the problem around llm-generated semantic block entities instead. later, when raw json generation became the bottleneck for complex models, i replaced it with a pythonic dsl that could compile into the same model formats while letting the ai use loops and structure.
that pattern has repeated throughout my career: security research at raytheon, marketplace/product architecture at tabu art, customer workflow mapping at stripe, ai product building with blocksmith, and now product systems work at meshy.
the blocksmith ai webapp has been sunset. but i open sourced the core model generation engine + a new animation pipeline to generate llm-driven animations for your models. texturing support wasn’t ported over to the oss repo because of the complexity, but i outlined a relatively simple process that will work with gemini’s nano banana pro + blender. with the help of AI, it shouldn’t be too challenging to build out.
the oss repository can be accessed here, and the intention was to hand it over to hytopia but they’re unfortunately going through a difficult time right now and weren’t ready to take it on and continue to build and maintain it.
blocksmith is the only 3d ai app that can generate and texture 3d block style models (think Minecraft).
used by hytopia game devs to make models for their games. a top-performing game on the platform used blocksmith in their modeling flow to create many of their assets and characters.
other more recent things i’ve worked on: