Shawn Price

I'm a software engineer, CTO, technical founder, and trained coach based in Vancouver.

I've spent 20+ years building software, startups, teams, and open-source tools. My recent work is focused on AI agents, workflow software, LLM extraction, and the human habits that make new systems stick.

I live in Vancouver, Canada with my wife and son.

I run Slow Works, a product studio and AI implementation practice for companies and individual professionals whose repeat work is ready to become software.

Good products start with a problem worth solving. At Slow Works, we're turning those problems into useful software. Here's what we've been building & researching recently.

• Stratum: An Obsidian plugin to take Zotero notes through to a published academic research paper.
• Superfive: A portable personality layer that helps your AI understand how you think.
• BFFM-XGB: An open-source regression model that estimates Big Five personality traits from just 20 questions.

Quotes that have shaped my thinking

Incentives matter

— Tyler Cowen

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit

— Helen Keller

Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward

— Sam Altman

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy

— Warren Buffett

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast

— U.S. Navy SEALs

Anything not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge

— David Deutsch

The mimetic nature of desire accounts for the fragility of human relations

— René Girard

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

— Alan Kay

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship

— David Foster Wallace

You can go to shawarma plus by yourself and it can be so sad, but if you go with the right people, it can be life changing

— internetvin

Hell is meeting the best version that you could have become of your life

— Tobi Lütke

You can be the master of your fate, you [can] be the captain of your soul, but you have to realize that life is coming from you, not at you, and that takes time

— Timothée Chalamet