Asa Shepard

Independent researcher · AI coding agents & autonomous systems

I build tools that make AI coding agents reliable on real codebases; closing the gap between benchmark performance and what actually works in production. Currently focused on developer infrastructure for agents and research on what moves the needle.

Blog Writing on AI coding tools, context engineering, and autonomous agents →

Currently

Aspect Research Independent research on AI coding agent reliability (since Oct 2025)

aspectcode.com/lab

Research

Iterative Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for AI Coding Agents Refining repo-level guidance for AI coding agents via synthetic probes; guidance helps on SWE-bench Verified (Mar 2026)

draft

Recursive RAG Eval (World Wide Technology project) Evaluation framework for recursive exploration vs retrieval-augmented generation (Jan 2026)

github

Hackathons

TreeHacks 2026: Santé Multi-agent speech analysis for biomarkers (Feb 2026)

devpost

Other Projects

Campus Web App Williams College Marriage Pact analysis (2025–Jan 2026)

williamstf.com (williams.edu only)

FocalRouter Intelligent request routing for LLM APIs (2025)

github

HeatSheet F# DSL for optimizing track meet lineups (2025)

github

Minecraft Plugins Suite of ~10 Java plugins (~2021–2022); first shipped code — top plugin at 7,000 downloads

dev.bukkit.org

Previously

Yosa Co-founder; HIPAA-aligned mental wellness platform with 30 active providers (2025–2026)

yosaapp.com

OnCabaret Contract software engineer; social app for a NYC startup with 2,000 users (2025)

oncabaret.com

Web Surfing Studios Software engineer intern; built full-stack web applications (2024)

websurfingstudios.com

WSO (Williams Students Online) Front-end developer and tester (2024)

wso.williams.edu

theme: dark