Asa Shepard
Researcher and Engineer · Reliable agents & autonomous systems
Asa has built agents for payments infrastructure at Visa, worked at several startups starting at Cycorp, and previously co-founded a healthtech platform after creating projects with tens of thousands of users since 2019. Currently working on Sediment.
Blog Writing on AI coding tools, context engineering, and autonomous agents ↓Currently
Research
Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents
Refining repo-level guidance for AI coding agents via synthetic probes; guidance helps on SWE-bench Verified; accepted to COLM WAB 2026 (Jan-Jun 2026)
arXiv
Cross-Repository Guidance for Coding Agents: A Single-Trial Replication Addendum
A companion to probe-and-refine: mining transferable edits from 50 external repositories yields guidance that resolves 45.4% of SWE-bench Verified vs. 39.6% baseline, without tuning on the target repo (May 2026)
preprint
Structural Grammar of the Voynich Manuscript: Characterization and Mechanism Discrimination
Exploring the Voynich manuscript through 40 hours of long-running agentic work (Apr 2026)
preprint
Recursive RAG Eval (World Wide Technology project)
Evaluation framework for recursive exploration vs retrieval-augmented generation (Jan 2026)
github
Hackathons
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
Visa
Software Engineer Intern; bay area, creating agents, Cybersource team (Summer 2026)
cybersource.com
Aspect Research
Research on reliable AI agents (Oct 2025–Aug 2026)
aspectresearch.org
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