V . B₂ — SWISS/BRUT — DARK / CRIMSON — HENRIKALBIHN.COM
H/ ALBIHN  ·  INDEX
AI ENGINEER — STRANGE LOOP LABS — IRVINE CA
NOW / HIGH-THROUGHPUT AGENTIC CODING — CONTEXT IS THE NEW PROMPT — TICKET-RS.IO / PUBLIC ALPHA SGREP.SH / SUB-10MS SEMANTIC SEARCH SQLGENIE.AI / 23+ SQL DIALECTS 70% FAILURES = CONTEXT ERRORS AVAILABLE FOR ADVISORY
Doc 001
File / Personal

h/albihn
builds the
harness.

AI Engineer at Strange Loop Labs, forward-deployed into Fortune 500 and Big Four engagements. Founder of ticket-rs.io, sgrep.sh, sqlgenie.ai. Classical ML on the outside of the model. No theory without receipts.
Role
AI Engineer.
Based
Irvine, California
Status
Available for advisory
Scale
30K+ brands
millions / day
Reach
3.5M readers / mo
01.
Now / The Work

Models are commoditizing. The differentiated work is the harness — retrieval, ticket graphs, ensemble routing, SPC on the outside of the model.

At Strange Loop Labs — forward-deployed AI, built by Amazon Alexa engineers — I own technical architecture and delivery across client engagements. Exec discovery through production, regulated enterprise document workflows at scale.

Internally: high-throughput agentic coding. Classical ML applied to the code-generation loop — ensemble methods, online learning, statistical quality control. Map-reduce-style ticket-driven development with ticket-rs as the persistent context graph.

I write Vanishing Gradients from the forward-deployed trenches. No theory without receipts; no claim without code.

02.
Ventures / Tools
No. System Description Go
001
ticket-rs
2026 · Public alpha · Coding agents · Founder
AI-native issue tracking. Git-backed, local-first, PageRank-prioritized. MCP servers for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Cline, Gemini, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains.
002
sgrep
2026 · Public alpha · Developer tools · Founder
Grep by meaning, not keywords. 8M-parameter Model2Vec via Candle, pure Rust, sub-10ms semantic search. One static binary, zero API calls.
003
sqlgenie
2024 · Founder · Data
Natural-language query engine across 23+ SQL dialects. ~200× lower per-query cost than manual baseline. Inbound from TechStars, multiple VCs, and two acquirers in the first 90 days.
03.
Writing / Archive
001 Level Up Coding 3× faster file conversion with DuckDB. Data engineering
002 Level Up Coding The modern data stack is dead. Thesis
003 Level Up Coding Dipping your toes into JavaScript. Cross-language
004 AI in Plain English What the heck is a classifier? Primer
005 AI in Plain English Decision boundaries. ML foundations
006 AI in Plain English On text similarity search. Retrieval
007 AI in Plain English Detect anything in text — GLiNER for zero-shot NER. NER
008 AI in Plain English Efficient text classification with GLiClass. Classification
009 AI in Plain English The Qwen 2.5 model family. LLM survey
010 AI in Plain English GPT anywhere — running LLMs locally with Ollama. Local LLMs
04.
About / Arc

Economics → data science → ML science → applied AI → forward-deployed engineering.

Before Strange Loop Labs: Principal AI Scientist at a stealth AR/VR startup, shipping a real-time manufacturing copilot on Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro.

Before that: owner of the size-recommendation engine at True Fit — the company's flagship product, serving millions of shoppers daily across 30K+ brands including Nike, Target, Walmart.

Each transition sharpened the same edge: pattern recognition across markets and systems.