About

I'm Keith Hayden — novelist, technologist, USAF veteran. I've been running HAC Studios independently for five years, building a body of work at the intersection of military fiction and emerging technology.

My genre is military game-tech fiction. Cereus & Limnic is a long-form project set in a near-future Pacific theater, dense with actual science and a researcher who is losing his mind to a drone specimen he can't stop smelling. Prompted Hearts & Grief Algorithm lives in techno-romance territory: AI systems, human attachment, the question of what constitutes real connection. Both books exist because I write toward problems that interest me, not toward markets.

I've been working with AI tools in my writing practice for years — generative audio, voice synthesis, language models as collaborative revision partners. I'm not a skeptic and I'm not a true believer. I'm a practitioner. These tools have real utility and real failure modes, and I've developed opinions about both.

Code Platoon is a 15-week veteran-focused intensive coding bootcamp. I enrolled to close a specific gap: I can direct AI systems and understand their outputs, but I lack the formal engineering layer that lets me build from scratch, debug at depth, or collaborate fluently with developers. Syntax, algorithms, data structures, full-stack frameworks, collaborative workflows — that's what the 15 weeks are for.

This blog is not a beginner tutorial. It's not a bootcamp advertisement. It's a practitioner's learning log from someone who already lives in this technology and is now acquiring the credentials to go deeper.

More at keithhayden.net.