Shawn Wang
Founder, Smol AI | Host, Latent Space Podcast | AI Engineer World's Fair Organizer
Founder of Smol AI, host of the premier Latent Space AI podcast, and creator of the AI Engineer Summit and AI Engineer World's Fair. Popularized the defining title 'AI Engineer' in 2023, articulating the industry transition from classical ML research to full-stack foundation model application engineering. Creator of smol-developer and ai-notes, analyzing modern LLM eval suites, autonomous agent loops, and vibe coding workflows.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
The Rise of the AI Engineer
Authored the foundational essay formalizing the emergence of AI Engineering as a distinct discipline bridging fundamental AI research with real-world product engineering, evaluated by thousands of software organizations.
Descriptive industry synthesis rather than empirical algorithmic benchmark.
Context: Industry analysis, historical tech shifts, software engineering economics.
View missionsmol-developer: Autonomous AI Agent First-Principles Scaffold
Architected a minimalist autonomous junior developer agent implementing hierarchical prompt chaining, markdown codeblock parsing, and iterative multi-file synthesis from human specification prompts.
Relies on single-pass top-down dependency planning without dynamic AST execution sandboxing or test-driven self-healing loops.
Context: Python, Anthropic Claude & OpenAI API agent loops.
View mission