Public build competitions
Build seasons, made public.
Short, themed competitions that turn a prompt into working demos, written records, and proof of progress people can actually inspect.
Spring Into AI
The first four-week build sprint: shared prompts, working prototypes, and a public record of what participants discovered.
Explore Spring Into AI Summer seasonSummer Into AI 2026
Four themed weeks of games, tools, experiments, and essays—built in public with an unusually complete archive of the work.
Explore Summer Into AIPrincipal engineering · Applied AI · Complex systems
I build systems that work.
I’m Eric Rhea, a principal engineer and technical leader. My work spans financial platforms, applied AI, and the engineering practices that help complex systems remain reliable and ready to change.
Here I publish personal research, working prototypes, talks, and practical notes about engineering and emerging technology.
Selected work
Evidence before adjectives.
A few places where engineering depth, emerging technology, and operating judgment meet.
AI and embedded finance
Published guidance from Helix by Q2 on generative AI, privacy, risk, human review, and financial products.
A local AI API built for use, not spectacle
A documented LAN service wrapping local text, vision, image, and audio models with jobs, polling, history, and QA evidence.
When agent output exceeds human review
An experience-led governance essay about attention, escalation, testing, traceability, and knowing when to pause the machine.
Public AI build competitions
Two multi-week programs organized around prompts, rules, working submissions, demos, source links, and learning in public.
ArtLab: image, motion, and sound
Finished visual work with the cuts, comparisons, source files, and creative process left close enough to inspect.
How I operate
Clarity is an engineering control.
Over more than a decade, the recurring work has been the same even as the technology changed: name the consequential decision, make interfaces and ownership explicit, reduce hidden surprise, and leave a standard other people can use.
- Turn ambiguity into a decision the room can inspect.
- Design systems that reveal ownership, state, and failure.
- Use working artifacts to test strategy early.
- Scale team judgment instead of becoming the permanent bottleneck.
Latest field work
The record stays current.
Recent writing, experiments, and notes are pulled from the public catalog.
The Frontier Atlas
500+ public artifacts, organized as a body of work.
The Atlas is the research index behind this public practice: searchable by topic, type, status, depth, date, and connection.
About
Engineering depth with an operator’s sense of consequence.
I work where technical systems, product choices, and organizational judgment collide. The useful outcome is not more activity; it is a clearer decision, a more reliable interface, and a team better equipped for what changes next.
This site includes AI-assisted research, prototyping, cataloging, and editing. I direct the work, verify and revise its claims, and take responsibility for what is published.
Talks and technical conversations
Need a clear 30-minute rundown on what is changing?
I enjoy practical talks for technical and leadership audiences. I also welcome focused advisory conversations and serious engineering discussions when the problem and desired outcome are clear.