About - The engineer you work with is the engineer doing the work.
William Warne has a background in mechatronics engineering — formal design review, failure mode thinking, requirements captured before anything is built. That discipline, applied to software delivery and augmented by AI, is what Zebra Labs is built around.
How we think - The principles behind the work.
- Classical engineering applied to software. The mechatronics background means approaching software with a discipline most software engineers weren't trained in — formal requirements, failure mode thinking, design before build. Most quality failures in software are traceable to skipping these.
- Spec before code. Always. The spec is written before a line of code is touched. It surfaces misalignment early, makes output reviewable, and applies equally whether the implementation is written by a human or generated by AI.
- AI amplifies what's already there — in either direction. The teams generating reliable output with AI are the ones who had good discipline before it. The ones generating noise at scale had the same discipline gaps before — AI just made them faster. The discipline came first.
William Warne
Founder and Software Developer
William Warne
Founder and Software Developer
William works with founders and teams to build new systems, rebuild fragile ones, and add experienced software delivery capacity where momentum matters.
Track record
Delivered across 15+ ventures in AI, education, maritime, healthcare, and digital products. The pattern observed across all of them: the teams moving fastest had done the spec and design work first. The ones struggling had skipped it — and were paying compound interest on that decision.
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