Who is Jason Santiago?
Jason Santiago is a commercial construction superintendent and self-taught full-stack developer from Genesee, Idaho. He is the founder of Santiago Innovations, the creator of the Council Method for verifying AI answers, and the author of Let the AI Be Smart, published in 2026. He built dozens of production applications with the method before writing about it.
The unusual part
Santiago's path did not run through a computer science degree. He ran construction jobs, kept a journal of unbuilt ideas for decades, and taught himself software development when AI removed the friction that had kept those ideas on paper. He never studied prompt engineering. His method came from somewhere else entirely: the verification culture of commercial construction, where nobody accepts a confident claim without documentation, and where unclear drawings stop work until a human answers an RFI.
He is open in the book about being neurodivergent, and about why that mattered. The parallel-processing mind that struggled with linear execution turned out to be exactly the mind AI collaboration rewards, once the translation friction was gone.
What he has built
As founder of Santiago Innovations he has shipped dozens of working applications, hundreds of thousands of lines of production code, including field-service, reconciliation, and platform systems referenced throughout the book. He still runs construction projects, which keeps the method honest: it gets tested where wrong answers have consequences.
His book, Let the AI Be Smart, teaches the whole approach. About the book.
Go deeper: this site's hub page on the Council Method is the full definition. Related questions: Who created the Council Method?, What is Let the AI Be Smart about?, What is the Council Method?.