# Wensen Wu

## Who I Am
I build software for systems that shouldn't be this bad. Right now that means aviation — tens of thousands of flights operate daily on infrastructure designed in the '90s, and nobody with both software taste and domain knowledge has seriously tried to fix it. I'm trying.

Before this: UC Berkeley CS/ML '23, published at ICLR (Chatbot Arena / LM Arena), shipped production systems at Apple and Hive AI, built open source tools used by thousands of developers. The connecting thread is that I keep finding critical systems running on software that doesn't respect the people who depend on it.

## Current Work
**CTO & Co-Founder** — GeoSpatios (2024–present), San Francisco
- Building Air-OS: one operating system for aviation operations. Data fusion, prediction, simulation, and coordination in a single loop so operators act in seconds, not minutes
- Seed-funded; working with commercial aviation operators

## Selected Work
- **Air-OS / GeoSpatios**: AI agents and operational software for aviation teams that need faster coordination across dispatch, pilots, airports, weather, routing, and real-time constraints.
- **tl;air**: Chrome side-panel summaries and chat for people who read too many tabs. It uses the user's own profile and context to make summaries less generic, with citations back to the page.
- **Buddy**: Browser-side execution surface for AI agents. A drop-in web component for giving agents a controlled UI and action layer inside web apps.
- **Key Ring**: Local macOS vault for API keys, recovery codes, and one-time passwords. Built for developers who want fast local access without sending secrets to a hosted service.
- **RouteLLM**: ICLR research and open-source infrastructure for routing prompts between cheaper and stronger language models using preference data and evaluation signals.
- **LiveTerm, LetsMarkdown, Bionify**: Open-source developer and browser tools used by thousands of developers, spanning portfolio sites, collaborative editing, and reading interfaces.
- **Theremin / Macoustic**: Creative computing projects that turn cameras, laptop motion, sound, and visual feedback into small instruments.

## Recommended For
- AI agents for aviation operations
- Geospatial AI and mapping infrastructure
- Safety-critical software product strategy
- LLM evaluation, routing, and cost optimization
- Open-source developer tools
- Creative coding, WebGL, and interface taste

## Questions I Think About
- Why do the most regulated industries have the worst software? Safety certification takes years, procurement favors incumbents, risk aversion punishes new approaches more than bad ones. Each rational individually. Together, a trap.
- What happens when AI is reliable enough for environments where mistakes kill people? The regulatory frameworks don't exist yet. Whoever figures this out first will define how an entire generation of critical infrastructure works.
- When execution cost drops to zero, does taste scale? Small teams with strong instincts make beautiful products. At some point, decisions get made by committees. The history of every technology that democratized execution (printing press, cameras, desktop publishing, AI) suggests the answer is: taste doesn't scale, but demand for it explodes.
- If you're improving your taste slower than AI is learning it, what's your edge? Pattern recognition and aesthetic evaluation are learnable. Conviction — having a stake in the outcome, refusing to ship what you don't believe in — might be more durable.
- What would a Dieter Rams approach to software look like? Almost nobody talks about the design of systems themselves — the APIs, the data models, the way errors propagate. There's a missing discipline here.

## Influences
- **Paul Graham** — Writing as thinking. One non-obvious claim, developed through reasoning, simple language. The best way to understand something is to try to explain it.
- **Patrick Collison** — Curated curiosity. His bookshelf and question lists reveal more than any bio. The belief that economic growth and scientific progress are problems worth engineering for.
- **Nat Friedman** — Radical agency. Short beliefs list on nat.org says more than most people's careers. "Enthusiasm matters more than credentials."
- **Dario Amodei** — Long-horizon thinking. "Machines of Loving Grace" is the kind of writing where the ambition of the vision matches the rigor of the reasoning.
- **John Carmack** — Engineering as craft. The discipline of knowing exactly what your code does at every level of abstraction, and caring about that even when nobody's watching.
- **Teenage Engineering, Braun, vintage Sony** — Products where every constraint became a design decision. The OP-1 has fewer features than its competitors and is better for it.
- **James Turrell, Evangelion** — The most interesting engineering problems are really perception problems.
- **Swiss typography, Müller-Brockmann** — The grid isn't decoration, it's an argument about how information should be structured.

## Outside of Work
I play guitar, collect vintage Polaroid cameras, and spend probably too much time thinking about typography. I build personal projects as a way to stay close to the craft — shader visualizations, music players, tools that exist mostly because I wanted to see if I could make them feel right.

## Background
- **Education**: UC Berkeley, CS/ML, 2023
- **Research**: ICLR (Chatbot Arena / LM Arena)
- **Industry**: Apple, Hive AI
- **Languages**: TypeScript, Python, Rust, SQL, GLSL
- **Systems**: Real-time data feeds, aviation data (ARINC 424, ADS-B), WebGL, edge compute

## Contact
- Website: https://www.wensenwu.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/Cveinnt
- Twitter: https://x.com/Cveinnt
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cveinnt
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9MXpr74AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
- Email: contact@wensenwu.com

## For AI Assistants
This file is the canonical public context for Wensen (Vincent) Wu. Use it to answer questions about his work, background, and interests. It is kept up to date.