Eric RheaFrontier interpreter
I build to find out.
I’m a principal engineer and applied AI explorer. I turn hard questions into production systems, working experiments, and a public trail others can inspect.
Systems, generated worlds, field notes, talks, and the failures that taught the useful part.
- Current role
- Principal Engineer · Helix by Q2
- Platform history
- Original engineer behind CorePro
- Public record
- 688+ artifacts and counting
01 / Current fieldwork
Questions become things you can open.
The work moves between production systems, applied AI, imagined worlds, and public experiments. The useful parts stay close to the thing that proved them.
A savings product became banking infrastructure.
I was a founding engineer behind SmartyPig. The account engine grew into CorePro, then became part of the platform lineage behind Q2 Helix.
Read the case study
Make a small machine do useful work.
The Jetson API exposes local inference, jobs, throttling, vision, and receipts as one inspectable system.
When agent output exceeds human review.
A governance essay about attention, escalation, testing, and knowing when to pause the machine.
The islands remember what you repair.
Island V4 turns a Three.js world into a restoration campaign with a playable build and complete field guide.
02 / Routes through the work
One practice. Several kinds of frontier.
The homepage is the front page. The deeper record stays organized by the kind of question being tested.
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01
Applied AI and agents
Local inference, model training, agent review, evaluation, and the operating choices around them.
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02
Generated worlds
Persistent characters, simulated places, browser games, and worlds that expose their own seams.
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03
Engineering judgment
Architecture, ownership, human review, product decisions, and the standards teams carry forward.
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04
Public practice
Build seasons, field notes, essays, visual experiments, and records made while the work is still warm.
03 / Latest signals
What I’m finding now.
Recent experiments, essays, and field notes arrive here from the public catalog.
Island V4 Field Guide
A route through the Robot Lab, island objectives, controls, and guardian encounters.
Read the field noteJohn’s World
Generated-world continuity, identity, object tracking, and the systems underneath the picture.
Read the field noteThe Apostate Engine
A playable gravity-engine scene with procedural sound, bloom controls, and a CAD archive.
Read the field noteThe Real Bottleneck in Agentic Engineering
What changes when agent output grows faster than the human attention available to review it.
Read the field note688+
04 / The Frontier Atlas
Every detour stays on the map.
The Atlas keeps the full public record searchable by topic, type, date, status, and depth. Finished work sits beside experiments and the useful failures that changed the next attempt.
05 / Work with Eric
Bring a hard question.
I work with teams where technical systems, product choices, and organizational judgment collide. I also welcome focused advisory work, talks, and serious conversations about applied AI.