Twenty-five years building software. Still learning how it all works.

I've spent my career building systems while trying to grasp why they work, not that they work.

A decade building virtual human dialogue systems at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies. Studied cognitive science. A detour through symbolic AI at a JPL startup. Enough years shipping production software to know the elegant solution and the working solution are seldom the same.

I write software for financial services. It pays the bills and exercises the craft. But my mind keeps drifting toward what happened to my field. The transformer architecture and the scaling paradigm that followed it changed computing more than anything else I've witnessed, and I refuse to use these systems without understanding them.

What I'm doing

• Building reliable software in a regulated industry
• Self-studying the path from classical NLP to modern LLMs, writing about it as I go
• Exploring AI-assisted development with honest eyes: what it's good at, where it falls apart
• Looking for the next thing worth building

What I care about

Craft, clarity, and not pretending to know things I don't. The difference between wielding a tool and understanding it. We've built machines that appear to reason and nobody can explain why. That question drives most of what I do outside work.

Get in touch

I'm open to conversations about engineering, AI, and building things in a world that's changing faster than expected. Reach out at eric@forbell.com.