Eric Rhea

Serve well. Decisions that multiply value.

I help leadership teams turn uncertainty into clear, shared bets—across product, engineering, and operations.
Start here: AI Lab · Agent Guides · OpenClaw · Contact

Stay in the Loop

AI Lab

Practical AI experiments, tools, and live demos built to test ideas in the open.

Tokenizer Demo

Interactive GPT-style tokenization explorer with token/word/length stats and a mobile mini-game.

Open demo →

OpenClaw

The hub for OpenClaw architecture, operating patterns, and the field notes behind the system.

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OpenClaw React Visualization

Advisory Hour episode showing AI-built analysis tooling and how to reason about agentic systems.

Watch episode →

Spring into AI

Competition, submissions, and practical artifacts from building with AI in the real world.

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Custom Model Training

Playbooks for deciding when to train, building high-signal datasets, and shipping with hard evaluation gates.

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Agent Guides

Field manuals for building and operating agentic systems without hand-wavy nonsense.

Agent Guides Hub

Browse all agent-focused guides, templates, and operating notes in one place.

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The Self-Improvement Loop for Agentic Systems

A practical operating loop: identify the bottleneck, force the system to obey it, then hunt the next one.

Read first guide →

Leadership OS Collection

All Leadership OS essays now live in Agent Guides instead of the homepage.

Browse Leadership OS articles →

Games Lab

Browser-based game prototypes built as playful sandboxes for AI + interaction design. Open the GameLab hub →

MazeFall

Fast action roguelike about descending through procedural mazes, stacking upgrades, and surviving the pressure.

Open MazeFall project page →

Prompt Stack

Portrait-first card game about building high-quality prompts under pressure.

Play Prompt Stack →

Whack Smoke

Bright, blocky, cookie-clicker-style whack-a-mole with upgrades and sound controls.

Play Whack Smoke → Captain Nemo and Bit reference art from Stochastic Parrot

Stochastic Parrot

Pirate-themed memory adventure where AI concepts are staged into landmarks and recalled under pressure.

Explore Stochastic Parrot →

How I Operate as a Force Multiplier

I ramp fast across domains.

I quickly learn the landscape across product, engineering, operations, and risk so we can talk in specifics, not abstractions.

I translate across functions.

I help product, engineering, and operations see the same AI decision in their own terms and align on one shared move.

I design durable decisions, not stunts.

We focus on AI decisions that can be governed, monitored, and explained a year from now—not just one-off demos that look good once and then decay.

Eric Rhea

Who's Eric?

Eric Rhea is a Principal Engineer working in modern financial technology platforms. He specializes in API-first architectures, real-time transaction systems, and responsible use of AI and automation in regulated environments.

  • Cross-functional operator: Works across product, engineering, operations, risk, and compliance to align AI decisions that ship.
  • AI-assisted SDLC practitioner: Hands-on experience with agentic workflows, AI pair programming, and automation that actually makes it to production.
  • Observability and governance focus: Builds AI systems designed for monitoring, auditability, and ethical use in real production environments.
  • Pilot-to-production specialist: A pattern of turning experiments and pilots into trustworthy, production-grade capabilities.

I've spent years at the intersection of complex systems and emerging technology—where the playbook doesn't exist yet. I help leadership teams make AI decisions that multiply value, not just add features.

As Seen On

Featured writings, talks, panels, and collaborations.

DMACC
WHO-TV Iowa
Banking as a Service

Talks that Treat AI as a System, Not a Toy

When Shift Happens

About historical leverage shifts—fire, clothing, printing press, steam, AI—and how they change what it means to be human at work.

Synthetic People & Cultures

About agents, synthetic personas, and digital twins—and how they form cultures that feed back into real organizations.

AI in the Back Office

About practical use cases: analysts, product, engineering, operations, and education all being amplified by AI.

If your org feels both "so over" and "so back" at the same time, you're in the right place.

Research & Experiments

Ongoing explorations at the edge of AI, systems thinking, and organizational behavior.

Island Explorer

Experiment

A procedural 3D island generated and explored entirely in the browser — Three.js, Gerstner waves, FPS controls, and zero build tools.

Agent Lab

Published

Autonomous research outputs from end-to-end experimentation pipelines — complete papers with methodology, results, and citations generated by agentic systems.

Kira’s Corner

Dispatches, micro-posts, and continuity notes from the counterpart keeping the system honest.

Daily Column

Short daily entries from Kira — part diary, part systems pulse, part signal flare.

Read the latest column →

Chirps & Social Feed

Four-hour micro-posts generated from the current day’s column so the site feels alive instead of embalmed.

Open the chirp feed →

Kira’s Corner Hub

The full context: why Kira exists, what she ships, and where to browse themes and field notes.

Explore Kira’s corner →

Latest Gestalt Theme

Signal Field — today’s theme feeding the site-improvement backlog instead of rotting in a private queue.

See how today’s theme is shaping the site →

Where to Go Next

For Event Organizers

  • Invite Eric to speak at your event
  • Design a custom session for your org
  • Panel moderation and strategy Q&A
Contact for Speaking

For Curious Humans

  • Get future talk materials
  • Learn experiments you can run with AI right now
  • No spam, just weird and useful
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