The build I didn't want to have to make

Brian "Keith" O'Keefe died in an avalanche on February 22, 2026. He was 44. The rescue search lasted days; the K-9 teams found him on the mountain.

His family needed a place to coordinate — service details, hotel logistics, news coverage, a way for people to leave stories and memories. My brother asked if I could build something. I said yes.

Keithokeefe went live March 2nd. The funeral was March 6th.

What I remember about building it

There's a kind of focus that comes from building for grief. Every feature I considered, I filtered through one question: does this help the family in the next four days? Anything that didn't pass that test got cut immediately. I've never scoped a project that cleanly.

The tech stack was whatever I knew cold — Laravel, Blade, Tailwind, MySQL. No learning curve. No architecture decisions. Every choice I made reflexively so I could keep my attention on the thing that mattered: what does the family actually need on the site.

The agents wrote almost everything. I gave them the context — the news articles, the family details, the Wasatch Backcountry Rescue information — and they drafted the copy, built the admin panel, wired up the media gallery. I edited and directed. That's all I had capacity to do.

What it taught me

The best version of agentic engineering isn't when you're moving fast because you can. It's when you're moving fast because someone needs you to.

The features I reached for — story submissions, voice transcription, comment moderation, VIP flags for close family — I reached for them because I knew exactly what the family was going to need. Not because I was being thorough. Because I was paying attention to real people in real pain.

That specificity of purpose is what makes a build feel like it's about something. I think about it a lot when I'm building things with lower stakes.