About
Senior AI Researcher at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, and Distinguished Expert at the Singularity Intelligence Research Institute. Focused on AI agent system design, LLM engineering, and enterprise AI applications. I proposed the Dual-Axis Agent Design Framework (cognitive functions × execution topology) and the Pattern Selection Card methodology to guide the design, decomposition, and deployment of complex agent systems.
Before A*STAR I spent seven years at Accenture Singapore as a senior consultant, working on enterprise systems across MedTech, FinTech, and supply chain. Before that, twenty years of IT in roles that taught me what production actually looks like, which is mostly different from what the slide decks claimed it would.
What I write about
Agent architecture. The thesis I keep returning to: the model spends; the harness budgets. The longer version: agent architecture is the design of bounded resource allocation under uncertainty. Twenty-seven patterns, seven cognitive functions, six topologies — all of them are different ways of allocating a finite resource pool under different scarcity constraints.
The long form of that argument is Designing AI Agents (Manning). The newsletter, Agent Design Patterns, is where the shorter pieces live.
The other half
I am also a certified counsellor — trained under China’s national psychological counsellor certification — with seven years on a Singapore counselling helpline. Five hundred clinical hours, all phone work.
Phone counselling is reading a person through a narrow channel: voice, pause, breath, the words they pick and the ones they avoid. You decide call by call when to escalate and when to hold. That skill set turns out to map onto the harness around an LLM more directly than any of my software engineering background did. A counsellor and a harness do the same job — not produce the right answer, but recognise the wrong one before it commits.
Books
I write in Chinese and English about machine learning, GPT, AI agents, RAG, data analysis, and AI-assisted software engineering.
Selected books → · Professional profile (PDF) →
Teaching
I teach four columns and video courses on Geek Time (极客时间), China’s leading tech-education platform: machine learning, LangChain, AI applications, and a free ChatGPT public course. My cumulative audience there is more than 100,000 engineers.
Contact
Email is fine but slow. I read everything; replies are selective. The better way to reach me is to comment on a Substack essay or LinkedIn post — public discussion is where I am actually present.
Pen name: 咖哥 (KaGe). The Chinese books, the Geek Time courses, the WeChat following — all under that name. Look me up on the Chinese version of this site if you want the full picture.