# Mac Anderson

> Mac Anderson is the founder and CEO of Oxagen, the author of Engineering Deterministic AI Coding Agents, and the creator of Stella, an open-source coding agent. He researches and builds coding agents that ship software on their own.

Canonical page: https://macanderson.com/

Mac Anderson researches agentic coding systems and builds coding agents. Some of them are self-evolving: they write their own tools and get better at the job. His goal is software that agents deliver on their own, and that is useful, scales, and stays easy to maintain. He lives in Los Angeles. He is the founder and CEO of [Oxagen](https://oxagen.sh), workforce management for autonomous agents. Each agent gets its own identity, a mandate that sets what it may do and spend, the tools it needs, and a record of what it did. He also created [Stella](https://github.com/macanderson/stella), an open-source coding agent written in Rust, and wrote *Engineering Deterministic AI Coding Agents*, a field manual in 21 parts.

He wrote software by hand for 16 years. Before Oxagen he co-founded Fonteva, a Salesforce-native software company for associations that Togetherwork acquired in 2021, and founded inTown Technologies, which built software for city governments. In 2026 he handed all of his coding to agents and kept the job of directing them, reading their work, and deciding what merged. Between 26 February and 20 September 2026 his GitHub account recorded 21,861 contributions, against 38 in all of 2025.

## What he builds

- **[Oxagen](https://oxagen.sh)** gives each AI agent an identity, a mandate, equipment, and a record. For actions routed through Oxagen, the agent asks, a rule the team wrote answers, and Oxagen records the answer with its cost. It wraps the agents teams already run, such as Claude Code and Codex.
- **[Stella](https://github.com/macanderson/stella)** is a fast, model-agnostic terminal coding agent in Rust. You bring your own model key. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, with both agents on the same model, Stella solved 58 of 89 tasks and Claude Code solved 44.
- **[Arena](https://arena.oxagen.sh)** runs a coding agent head to head against Claude Code, Gemini, and other agents, with regression checks.
- **[Context Graph Protocol](https://contextgraphprotocol.org)** is an open specification for representing, exchanging, and accounting for an agent's context as a typed graph of frames, with JSON schemas, a conformance suite, and SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go.

## What he writes

- **[Engineering Deterministic AI Coding Agents](/manual)** is a free field manual in 21 parts with 27 cited sources. Parts 1 to 13 show how to build the deterministic system around a coding agent. Parts 14 to 20 show how to operate the agents you run. Every part ends with steps for this week and metrics to track.
- **[Research](/research)** holds essays on how agents work, fail, and should be operated, each with its sources.

## Where to start

- If an agent costs too much or behaves differently each time, read [part 1](/manual/agents-are-not-expensive-bad-architecture-is) and [part 2](/manual/stop-making-agents-read-your-logs).
- If you answer for several agents, read [part 14](/manual/give-every-agent-its-own-identity), [part 15](/manual/write-the-mandate), and [part 16](/manual/the-agent-asks-a-rule-decides).
- To find out what to fix first, take the [self-assessment](/manual/self-assessment).
- To ask a question about Mac or his work, use the [assistant](/ask).

## Contact

Email [mac@oxagen.sh](mailto:mac@oxagen.sh). Mac is [macanderson on GitHub](https://github.com/macanderson), [macanderson on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/macanderson), [@macandersoncto on X](https://x.com/macandersoncto), and [macanderson on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/macanderson). His ORCID iD is [0009-0005-1646-9676](https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1646-9676). New research, field manual updates, and his upcoming video series go to [subscribers](/subscribe) first.