About Eric Qian

What I'm exploring

Today, I work in analytics engineering as a tech lead and continue to explore how emerging technologies become useful, trustworthy systems in real work.

I've been following language models since before they entered the mainstream. My current interests include analytical harnesses, organizational knowledge systems, and the context, memory, judgment, and evaluation layers that surround AI.

This site is where I think through those questions. I write and build to understand how AI is changing software development, knowledge work, and the way organizations operate.

How I work

My work cycle runs in roughly three modes:

• Reading and note-taking — I read widely and keep a physical notebook for the things that feel significant before I know why. This is mostly invisible; it's the substrate everything else builds on.
• Writing and thinking — Long-form essays are how I work out what I actually think about something. I use AI tools as thinking partners and draft accelerants, but the editorial function — what's worth saying, what to cut — stays mine.
• Building — Some ideas become projects. I build mostly with TypeScript, Astro, and Supabase. This site is itself a project: an experiment in what a personal digital base should look like in 2024.

What I believe about technology

Technology isn't neutral. Every tool encodes a theory of what matters. The question is whether you're the one choosing the theory, or whether you've just adopted someone else's defaults.

I think the most interesting moment in AI is not the capabilities themselves, but the question of how they change the things that remain valuable when capability becomes cheap. Judgment, taste, context, commitment — these were always the hard parts. AI raises the floor on everything else. The ceiling is where the interesting work happens.

Contact

The best public ways to reach me right now are GitHub, LinkedIn, or [email protected].