Stephen Dulaney — Forward Deployed Engineer

I have run the whole loop unaccompanied: scoped the problem on site, built the system there, shipped it, and kept improving it in the field while real people depended on it every day. I have done it in a family's home and I have done it for a C-suite. Both deployments are still running.

What I bring that most forward-deployed engineers don't is the front half of the job. For fourteen years at Deloitte Digital I ran field research for TJ Maxx, Intel, Whirlpool and Constellation Brands — contextual inquiry, on-site investigation, diary studies. That is the skill of walking into an operation you don't understand and leaving with the real problem instead of the stated one. Then I learned to build the thing myself.

Why I do this

Everybody has been corrected by a machine. Wrong password. Wrong format. Are you sure?

I spent thirty years building those machines. I got good at it — the systems I build now check each other's work, so nothing can ever mark itself complete. I don't let software lie.

Then I built one for a woman with Alzheimer's, and the first rule I had to write was: never correct her.

Because the correction vanishes and the wound stays.

That was the day I discovered my purpose in AI. I wasn't building tools. I was building memory. Machines need it to become someone. She needs it to stay someone. It takes a village to raise an agent — and about the same to keep a person.

Discovery is a wonderful memory. I exist so everybody keeps theirs.

Deployments

Live sites · not case studies

Site: A private residence
Hardware: Raspberry Pi · ~$150/unit
Users: One family, daily

A voice companion for dementia care, deployed into a real home

Rose is a voice-first AI companion built on Raspberry Pi hardware, with an encrypted on-device vault holding her care records. I scoped the need on site with the family, shipped it, and have maintained it in the field ever since — a single-purpose device, no distractions, push-to-talk.

It runs a care doctrine, not a chatbot script: never correct what they remember, enter their reality, redirect to feeling and story, choose kindness over accuracy — because the correction vanishes and the wound stays.

Field note

The unit dropped twice in one evening — fifteen minutes each time, both on the quarter hour. The regularity was the finding: that pattern is a scheduled job, not flaky Wi-Fi. Monitoring now pages a human with the artifact, because "the service is running" and "the family can talk to her" are different claims.

Site: 1,000-person agency
Recipients: CEO · CTO · Chief of Staff · dept leaders
Method: Interview-built, white-glove

Executive AI enablement as white-glove forward deployment

I built personalized AI workspaces by interview and deployed them to the CEO, the CTO, the Chief of Staff to the CEO, and department leaders — each with an identity file, persistent memory that survives sessions, and skills matched to that person's actual rituals.

Executives get one shot. Every deployment was rehearsed end to end on my own workstation and pre-configured down to the bookmark. The Chief of Staff went from recipient to operator and published her own account of running her operations on it.

Engines: 4 coding engines, 1 task board
Board: 452 tickets · 215 agent-estimated
Constraint: Builder ≠ verifier

An autonomous AI software team that closes a field-to-lab loop

Agents living in real homes surface what people need and file user stories. An orchestrator routes the work. Lab agents write the acceptance criteria and the code, and a separate agent — never the one who wrote it — verifies each build on digital twins before it ships back to the field.

Four model providers run inside one harness on a cheapest-first cost ladder: local models on the home LAN, then Haiku, then Sonnet, then a frontier model, escalating one rung only when the rung below fails verification.

The constraint that makes it safe

Builder and verifier are separate processes on separate machines by construction, so no build can mark itself complete. Every build attempt writes a cost record with real token counts from the provider's own usage report. When a path can't be measured, the record stores null and the reason — because a guessed number is a lie the dashboard would repeat.

What I do on site

Scope the real problem

Discovery interviews and contextual inquiry inside your operation — fourteen years of it — to find the problem behind the stated one.

Build it there

Agentic systems, voice and edge AI, orchestration, RAG, MCP servers. Python, TypeScript, Rust, GCP, Terraform.

Prove it works

Evaluation panels, acceptance-criteria gates, independent verification, and instrumented cost per build.

Teach your people

Where to use AI and where not to. Executive enablement, an internal 30-day agentic-IDE course, and operators who outgrow me.

On the record

Filed · published · shipped

Patent — sole inventor

U.S. Utility Patent Application No. 19/699,809 Methods for agentic AI systems, filed June 2026.

Patent — co-inventor

U.S. Patent 8,417,509 B2 — Natural Language Interface Customization Issued April 2013; continuation 9,239,660 B2 issued January 2016. Assigned to AT&T, now held by Microsoft Technology Licensing.

Publication

On the Walls Surrounding Quantum Integer Factorization With Clark Alexander, May 2026. A bound on which integers Shor's algorithm can factor. I pushed simulated factorization from 16 bits to 19 — factoring 522,713 = 727 × 719 in 21 qubits and 32 MB of RAM on a laptop — by recovering periods standard implementations discard as failures. ~4,900 lines of Rust with WGSL compute shaders.

Books

The As The Cloud Turns series, and other titles Written, produced and published through QuantumDynamX Publishing on a markdown-to-print pipeline I wrote — EPUB, print interior, cover, spine geometry — so a finished manuscript becomes a submitted book without a designer in the loop.

Education

The University of Texas at Austin MBA · B.S. Mathematics · B.A. Physics (quantum focus)

Before this

Thirty years, shipping

Merge — Agentic Systems Architect

2025–2026

Founding member of its enterprise AI research lab; founder of AI Garage Explorers, chartered with the CTO's sponsorship. Built the evaluation practice, the model-routing layer, the MCP tooling, and the secure GCP sandbox the agent swarms rehearse in.

Deloitte Digital — Senior Consultant, UX & Applied AI Lead

2011–2025

Field research for TJ Maxx, Intel, Whirlpool, Constellation Brands. Built Daria, an agentic research prototype. Five first-in-the-nation ACA health insurance exchanges. GenAI integrations for JPMorgan Chase and UBS. Led UX for Kaiser Permanente's digital transformation, scaling the team from 1 to 12.

AT&T — Senior Business Manager / Senior Web Developer

2001–2011

Led eRepair, an online trouble-ticketing system that raised self-service 40% and handled more than 1M transactions a year. Co-inventor on the natural-language routing patent.

frog design — Senior Systems Analyst / Technology Lead

1997–2001

Grew Microsoft into a leading account. Built the StoryServer backend behind Hoover's at 1M daily page views. Technology Lead on Prodigy Client Kit 7.0 — the world's first multi-tabbed web browser.

Power Computing — Lead Web Developer

1996–1997

Built one of the first fully automated e-commerce platforms in personal computing, with real-time credit-card authorization. The end-to-end purchase flow helped drive $1M a day in online sales.

In the open

Built in public

Every company in AI is building the assistant on your desk. I'm building the AI in your room — on hardware under $200, in the open, for households rather than employers.

Bringing AI Home

The thesis and four products that live in houses — Mojo, Mrs. Hudson, Miss Watson, and Rose. Open source.

Read → Substack

Essays on agentic engineering practice — running real sprints with AI agents, and the verification discipline that keeps them honest.

Read → Books

The As The Cloud Turns series and other titles, published through QuantumDynamX Publishing.

Amazon → GitHub

Where the work actually lives.

Code →