These days I’m traveling, playing with AI, and following my curiosity.
I grew up in San Francisco and studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. I was an early engineer at Palantir, then spent a decade building startups—including one of China’s most widely used apps for college students and a network helping companies find and manage remote engineers.
I built the first version over a weekend in 2011 as a visual way to browse Show HN projects on Hacker News. Years later, I rebuilt it in an evening, adding AI to label the projects and offer a take on each one.
I liked Ghostty on my Mac and wanted the same terminal on the Windows PC I use to run local models. So I built a Windows port and made it open source.
After playing with OpenClaw, I wanted an AI agent I could change more easily. I built Burin to explore memory, context, long-running tasks, and how agents might improve themselves.
I’ve slowed work on it lately as agents from the major labs have become more capable.
More experiments at Everglades.
Eight lessons on making AI agent workflows more reliable.
Find me on X (@shiweiso).
