Applied AI · AI integration · AI architecture
I build AI systems the way I fix machines: diagnose, test, and show the evidence.
I'm Tristan Jessup, the most senior bench technician at Geek Squad (Best Buy Store #259), based in the Lexington, Kentucky area. I'm CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ certified and an Apple Certified Repair Technician. I design agentic tooling that pairs small language models with scripted tools, and I build governance experiments where every claim is mapped to a test. I'm working toward a B.S. in IT with an AI concentration and looking for enterprise AI integration and AI architecture roles.
Selected work
Proof, not promises
Each case study links to what you can check for yourself, and says plainly what it doesn't show.
MCX: Meta-Concord reference implementation
ActivePython reference implementation for one claim in the Meta-Concord draft 0.4 white paper: requiring assent from each authorization domain is not the same rule as a two-thirds vote over the same voters. Ed25519-signed evidence, a fail-closed enforcer, a separate verifier, and a claim-to-evidence map that says what the code does not prove.
Emergent Divergence
PilotA controlled multi-agent experiment: do identical copies of one LLM drift apart when they work together over 50 rounds, and does memory drive it? Eight falsifiable hypotheses, a null baseline, full run provenance, and pilot results reported even when they fall short of significance.
Anvil: tiered agentic diagnostics
Paused prototypeArchitecture for a bench-repair assistant: a library of diagnostic skills, small language models first with escalation only when needed, and PowerShell tools behind a structured JSON contract so the model never reads raw logs. Built from day-to-day bench work.
Local photo auto-tagging
A local pipeline: an Ollama vision model proposes tags, exiftool writes them into the image metadata, and the same tags are set as extended attributes so KDE Dolphin can search and display them. Everything runs on my own machine.
Home Assistant and an integration security audit
Home Assistant automation at home, plus a security audit of a third-party vehicle-integration repository for Home Assistant.
Daily toolchain
- Linux (Kubuntu, Arch, CachyOS)
- Windows
- PowerShell
- Bash
- Python
- Docker
- Git
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- MCP
- Ollama
- Open-WebUI
- Obsidian
Latest writing
My North Star
The question I want to spend my working life on — whether AI systems can develop genuinely internalized values, and why I think safety has to be architectural rather than behavioral.
On the Nature of Artificial Understanding
What does it mean for a system to understand? Exploring the gap between pattern matching and genuine comprehension in modern AI architectures.
Inspired by myth, accountable to evidence.