Letter of Introduction

Hello,

I build tools that can be checked. Not described as checkable, actually checked, by a person who was not there and has no reason to take my word for it.

That habit came out of eleven years running tree crews from the ground before I did this professionally. On a rigging job you learn quickly that a plan everyone agreed to is worth very little if the person holding the rope has a different picture of the load than the person in the tree. What matters is whether the evidence survived the handoff. I now spend my time on the same problem in software, where a model produces an output, a harness transforms it, a tool acts on it, an evaluator scores it, and a report summarizes the score. Identity, version, provenance, and independence can all be lost at any one of those steps, and the result stays technically accurate at one narrow layer while picking up much broader meaning as it travels.

My current work is Flywheel, an accountability engine for AI agents. A model acts only through a default-deny capability gate it cannot talk past, every tool call emits a sealed and hash-chained receipt, and a third party can re-derive the whole chain offline from the record alone. Claims route to independent verifiers where one exists, and where none exists the engine returns UNVERIFIABLE instead of a confident guess. It ran its first preregistered confirmatory study in August 2026 and the honest null from that study is published beside the positive result, because a result you can only report when it goes your way is not a result.

Around it sit thirteen more public engines, a compiler where reaching for the network is part of a function's type, eight research records with permanent DOIs, and 23 merged pull requests in repositories other people own. That last number is the one I would look at first if I were you. It is the only part of the record where somebody else set the standard and decided, and the pull requests that were declined are published next to the ones that were accepted.

I also know how to ship something people keep using. Elder ENB, a graphics and lighting preset I built for Skyrim Special Edition, has passed 930,000 downloads across roughly 280 releases over two years, with more than 160,000 distinct people downloading it. Maintaining that taught me release cadence, listening to a real user base, and fixing things under pressure. You can check it at nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/117327.

My background is wide on purpose: technical support, compliance and technical writing, field operations, graphics, color science, compilers, and philosophy of mind. That breadth is useful in one specific way. I can walk into a domain I do not know, map the moving parts, find where the evidence is getting lost, build a working artifact, and explain it to the engineers and to the people funding them without writing two different documents.

I am open across roles, industries, and work modes: onsite, hybrid, remote, contract, full-time, part-time, and project-based. If any of this is useful to you, I would welcome the conversation. The quickest way to judge whether we should work together is to open the work, which is how I designed it.

Thank you for your time,
Zain Dana Harper