A code janitor who builds AI infrastructure.

I'm Tristan Hyams - a polyglot software engineer, US Navy veteran, okay husband, adequate father. By day I work at Rad AI in the ML/healthcare space. By night I build the tools I wish existed, in whatever time I can steal by neglecting my family.

My favorite systems are highly distributed processing systems. I have no satisfying explanation for this. Some people restore vintage cars; I build and orchestrate durable workflow systems... then paint them red for speed. We all have our coping mechanisms.

Continuum started as the AI backbone for an emergent video game set on LV-426 - players automate a terraforming factory, where a psychotic MU/TH/UR 6000 runs the show. Building a durable long-lived context layer for a single-user game revealed a deeper problem: context management patterns for AI systems are fundamentally broken, and nobody's quite cracked this yet.

I inadvertently arrived at Anderson's ACT-R spreading activation theory while designing the Cortex retrieval engine. Comparing what I'd prototyped to 40 years of cognitive science research landed me in a pile of papers.

That was kind of affirming. Okay, it was a fairly decent ego boost.

Now I'm building it as production infrastructure - three-tier storage, graph traversal, confidence scoring, tension detection - without cutting corners just because it's a side project.