Hi, I'm Shawn.
Right now the internet feels like a casino. I'm trying to figure out how it might feel more like a park, or a café — somewhere you'd actually want to spend an afternoon.
Before Stanford, I worked as a data scientist — a way of seeing systems, incentives, metrics, and optimization that made me useful but also made it harder to feel hope. In the fall of 2025, I went inward. Two words kept emerging: optimism and joy. I started asking a design question: what kinds of environments make my chosen values easier to practice?
The first answer was physical. I built Shawn's Café — a warm space where the currency was not dollars but gratitude. The second answer turned toward the harder environment: the screen. I now build cafés — small, transparent, contestable systems that help people notice, choose, connect, and act. Most are AI agents. A few are tables, lights, or rooms.
My thesis, Agents in Service of Becoming, gathers three years of these prototypes into a single argument: technology cannot be neutral about human development. Every product carries a theory of the human inside it. I'd like to design products that imagine us as more than retention curves. The full written argument lives in The AI You Should Demand.
Selected work.
Curated projects · 2024 — 2026- I. Breadcrumbs A public e-ink window that surfaces a stranger's reading — to make conversation possible where there are walls. MMXXV
- II. Roy_bot An agent inside a private Discord that helps long-running friends return to each other. Roughly 2× more human-to-human chat on the days it shows up. MMXXVI
- III. Screen Nudge Reclaiming attention from the slot-machine. The room itself becomes a signal — the lights pulse red when the body forgets what the mind already chose. MMXXVI
- IV. Pumbit A house with two doors. A quiet table for new mothers; a vocabulary of small gestures for the village. Care held until it is ready to be received. MMXXVI
- V. Shawn's Café An almost-embarrassingly-analog café. Drinks in exchange for gratitude, compliments, or appreciation. The most common question: will this stay here? MMXXIV
A table set for her —
held, not asking.
"What if agents could help mothers receive the care needed to flourish through emergence, rather than only avoid pathology?" Pumbit · with Diane · 2026
Cafés,
not
casinos.
A casino and a café both shape behavior. Both are designed environments. Both use lighting, timing, seating, friction, and reward. But they are built with radically different intentions.
Infinite scroll imagines the human as a creature to be retained. Recommendation algorithms imagine the human as a preference profile to be predicted. Productivity tools imagine the human as a machine to be optimized. What if we started from a different theory?
keeps you inside, and separates you from yourself.
Pathways that loop. Lights that mask the hour. Reward schedules engineered for retention.
welcomes you in, holds a table, and lets you leave warmer than you arrived.
A door that opens both ways. A chair that fits one body. A small ritual offered with care.
The future of AI does not have to be smoother casinos. It can be stranger, slower, warmer, more human cafés.
What I'm working on.
Finishing the thesis book and shipping Pumbit to a small cohort of new mothers and their villages. Quietly prototyping a fourth agent — a coach that lives inside the calendar instead of the inbox.
Also: re-learning how to draw with a brush pen, and walking more than I sit.
Reading lately.
- Bowling Alone
- Robert Putnam — the loneliness of adulthood, charted.
- The Master & His Emissary
- Iain McGilchrist — two ways of attending to the world.
- The Tea Master
- Okakura Kakuzo — slow, deliberate offerings of presence.
- How to Do Nothing
- Jenny Odell — attention, refusal, and the bioregional imagination.
Let's build
a café.
I'm open to collaborations on calm technology, AI agents in service of becoming, and any work that asks the question — what would this look like, if we trusted the person on the other side?