Carl Gao (高世钦). Builder and founder.

tai 2026

An anti-doomscroll app for people who have a real reason to be on their phone. Before you open a distracting app, tai asks what you're there for. Junk answers don't count.

The goal is a phone that's net positive: blocking, daily goals, and a focus dashboard that feels more like a game HUD than a settings page.

role

founder, design + build

status

in development

site

gettai.app (soon)

VaultBix 2026

Co-founded a developer-security startup that stopped API keys, passwords, and secrets from leaking into AI tools.

Shipped two products: a CLI that wraps Claude Code in a PTY to catch secrets in real time, published on npm, and an open-source Chrome extension with 33 detection patterns that runs 100% locally.

What I learned: we built for the browser, but engineers live in the terminal. Pick the surface your users already use.

npm

378 downloads of vaultbix-cli in the last 12 months

Berkeley CS Academy summer 2026

UC Berkeley Pre-College Scholars, CS Academy. Seven weeks on campus in summer 2026.

Worked through Beauty and Joy of Computing in Snap!: higher-order functions, Markov chain text generators, a working 2048 clone, and recursive kaleidoscope drawings.