Dan Barrett

Founder & CEO of OpenProse (YC P26), Software Engineer of 12 Years, Experimenter, Catholic, Optimistic, UnconventionalI've been building and deploying LLM harnesses in production workloads for five years now. In January, I created a new kind of programming language called OpenProse, that induces agent harnesses to simulate an intelligent virtual machine. I tweeted about it, a lot of people started using it, and I raised a small pre-seed from YCombinator to build it out.Star it on Github: https://github.com/openprose/proseOr follow along: https://openprose.aiFrom 2021-2025, I was cofounder/CTO of Smashing—a consumer media company that used LLMs and novel agent architectures to build personalized feeds and newsletters.Background:I've worked for 12 years as a software engineer, tech lead, CTO, and independent deep learning researcher. I've built software and software teams from scratch to launch multiple successful B2B and consumer products.Salient: I've enjoyed making LLMs do interesting things since I first fine-tuned GPT-2 in 2020. I expect there are fewer than 1k people in the world who have spent as many raw hours interacting with LLMs and their progeny. Unsure if this is something to be proud of.In any case, my world has gotten more exciting, more disorienting, more optimistic, more anxiety-inducing, more productive, more entertaining, and more conducive to learning than anything I could have dreamed of five years ago.Other assorted projects and writings on the internet:* In 2021, I co-founded a venture-backed internet media project alongside Otis Chandler and a super talented team: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/smashing-an-ai-powered-app-for-online-readers-launches-to-the-public/* in 2021 I published a few open-ended articles about what LLMs might teach us about creativity: https://a11i.substack.com/p/synthetic-synthetic-creativity* in 2020 I co-created a substack dedicated to using prediction markets as a news service: https://incoming.substack.com/* in 2017 I designed a crypto protocol for allocating electromagnetic spectrum by way of free market: https://gitlab.com/pesas/whitepaper* in 2014, I co-created a chat room that published message hashes on a blockchain (<100 users)If you want to go for a walk around Boston and talk about the universe, our place in it, or the disorienting future, send DM...