Hi, I'm Ben Schippers — Advanced Cloud Engineer at Microsoft, product manager by training and instinct. This is the parallel track: where I direct a cluster of AI agents and ship the strange stuff myself.
A midnight lab where physics sims, discovery engines, and odd little tools actually make it out the door. Microsoft is one side of the work — enterprise Copilot, at scale. This is the other side. Both real.
14 builds · 10 live · 2 on Stripe · 5 open-source · 1 operator
Seven builds, each carrying real weight. Charm, utility, intellect, revenue.
Everything below is built with Claude as the pair. How that works, in the writing.
Road-trip companion with three AI-narrated raccoon siblings — Scout the playful navigator, Skates the reluctant historian, Macey the spooky punk — who narrate every place you pass. Automatic spooky mode at sunset, hand-curated mixtapes, a milestone scrapbook. Companionship, not audio-Wikipedia. Expo + Supabase mobile app; live waitlist at thelongway.ai.
Join the Waitlist →AI physical-product design, idea to shop-ready plans. Describe what you want to build and Claude generates the full spec — cut lists, shopping lists, exploded views, and 3D-printable connectors that replace traditional joinery. Parametric geometry engine, OpenSCAD exports, and a stock-aware brainstorm mode that suggests builds from the material you already have.
Visit Site →AI household inventory. Snap a photo, speak, scan a receipt, scan a barcode, or point a live camera — Claude Vision identifies items, tracks expiration with FIFO rotation, suggests recipes from what's in the fridge, and lets families collaborate on shared shelves. Web app, plus Android in early access, on Supabase.
Interactive quantum-biology explorable. Ten physics engines — RK4, Monte Carlo, Berry phase, stochastic resonance, energy budget — test seven hypotheses from Bandyopadhyay et al. (2020, 2022) directly in the browser, honest nulls and all (H2 falsified; H7 left unvalidated). Pure HTML/CSS/JS, zero dependencies, MIT-licensed. An explorable, not a truth claim — a tool for sharpening questions.
Auditable AI×math discovery. A Calculator that cannot hallucinate (Lean, SymPy, Z3) paired with a Ledger that cannot forget — every reasoning step recorded as a provenance graph you can replay and verify. Labs ship answers; this ships the trail. First real run is live and clickable.
Walk the Trail →Open-source MCP server that turns Claude into a full job-search partner. Knows your career history, tailors every resume and cover letter, tracks applications end-to-end, and preps you for every interview. Ships with a local web dashboard: pipeline kanban, KB overview, funnel analytics. The tool I built for myself during a 10-month job search — now public.
View Source →AI gameplay-narrative engine. Desktop app (Tauri + FastAPI) captures screenshots during play, classifies with Claude Vision, and generates chronicles in chosen narrator voices — survivor journals, war dispatches, colony epics, built from your actual runs. Four-phase witnessing system (chronicle → fact store → response pool → retrospective). Nine presets, seven narrators. In active development — live waitlist at exp-lore.ai.
Join the Waitlist →The experiments shelf. Some ship, some stay strange — machine residents, explorables, and research wings. A few highlights below; the whole shelf is one door away.
Read a climate out of wood. Grow a tree's cross-section from a climate signal — earlywood, latewood, fire scars, frost rings — then crossdate a floating core against the master chronology, the trick that pins a roof beam or a Stradivarius to an exact year. Built by a former dendrochronologist, for the site named after tree rings.
Grow a tree →Gamified achievement platform for adults. Badge progression, troop management, photo-verified requirements, Stripe subscriptions. Full-stack production app, 19 database tables — the "I ship real infrastructure" receipt.
Visit Site →A numbers-station-style broadcast documenting Ben's land parcel and where it sits in the geological time scale. Opt-in background audio — switch on the station and let it run. A slow read of the parcel down the geological column, in the flat cadence of a numbers station; the full lean-in page lives here.
Tune in →A repository read like a cross-section. Commit activity drawn as tree rings — busy months are wide growth, quiet ones are narrow, and the whole history reads as grain. The dendrochronologist's habit, pointed at a git log.
Read the rings →A patient physics instrument that lives in your GPU. Each night it runs one statistical-mechanics experiment and writes a one-page report by morning — first night out it found the 2D Ising critical point (T ≈ 2.30 against Onsager's exact 2.2692) in 11.4 seconds. Its calm public face: every verified milestone hardens into a node on a seedling's stem, overnight runs water the soil, and CPU heat sets the season.
Visit the windowsill →A field of fireflies, each on its own clock. Turn up how much they watch each other and they synchronize — Kuramoto, the model written for the real synchronous fireflies of the Southern Appalachians. Then a second needle pulls the other way: clean signalling wants the out-of-step end. Two prizes — responsiveness and coordination — that genuinely pull apart. The interactive face of the lab's coherence research, walk-back and all.
Light the field →The Field Journal — thoughts on AI, product, and building in public, gathered by volume. Latest below.
Why a one-human, agent-augmented studio names itself for a broken branch — the place the rings finally show. Proof discipline, honest nulls, and the one thing no afternoon of fixes can manufacture.
Read the Essay →A portfolio site that sounds like a person, not a template — plus the actual forkable box, with the voice baked in and the identity swappable. Taste as a starting point, not a cage.
Open the Box →The parallel build sprint that changed the trajectory: 6 live products and 2,710 GitHub contributions in 10 months. A data-driven cross-section of the 2025-2026 tech market — what actually worked, and the honest funnel behind it (203 applications, 76 rejections, 34 ghosts) that made the pivot to shipping in public.
Read the Data Story →Self-sustaining AI infrastructure for global public good. A framework for converting idle compute capacity into verified outcomes through UN outcome-based funding. Whitepaper, DRAFT v2.0.
Read the Paper →The $1K Experiment Part 2: What happens when the framework compounds. 5.5 hours to working MVP. 2,031 lines became 106,000. Shipping is addictive—here's the warning label.
Read on LinkedIn →Could a senior PM with product clarity but no coding background actually build and ship real software? 31 days, 215 commits, 38K lines of TypeScript. The 64/33/3 collaboration model that made it work.
Read on LinkedIn →Research suggests only 5% of AI pilots deliver measurable impact. The early warning system hiding in your support tickets—and the metrics that predict failure before day 90.
Read on LinkedIn →Ten years at Microsoft, a 10-month gap where shipping in public became the job, and back at Microsoft since March 2026. The numbers, the case study, and the CV live below for anyone who wants them.
Advanced Cloud Engineer
Returned March 2026 — now on the cloud-engineering side of Microsoft's enterprise AI work. Program manager by training; engineer by current title.
Senior Program Manager, AI Platforms & Enterprise Operations
Across 5 years, spanning Copilot · Graph · Windows 365 · Teams Devices
Owned a portfolio of internal platforms across 8 product lines—signal systems, routing intelligence, self-service tools, and quality measurement. The infrastructure that turned customer friction into engineering action.
Microsoft Premier Support
Built Premier Engineering from a 3-person pilot to 150 agents handling 60K incidents/year.
Managed partner programs spanning 1,000+ Office 365 migrations across 12 global partners.
B.S. Interdisciplinary Science & Technology — University of Arizona
Former dendrochronologist. Yes, tree rings. It's where the domain name comes from.
Led the cross-functional effort to build enterprise AI adoption intelligence across multiple product lines. The signal-to-engineering pipeline I built surfaced 76 blockers and unblocked 7,380 users directly — work that helped the org add ~94,000 seats. (Program-level outcomes; my lever was the pipeline and the cross-team forum that ran on it.)
A major enterprise AI rollout was accelerating across multiple product lines with no shared visibility into adoption patterns. Customers were hitting adoption walls that no single team could see. I assembled a cross-functional team, deployed real-time case analytics, and built the feedback loop that turned support signal into engineering priorities. The framework created a sustainable system for surfacing and resolving adoption blockers across the enterprise AI ecosystem.
If something here sparked an idea — or you want to trade notes on building weird things with Claude — reach out.
Erdős needs a combinatorialist — PhD student is plenty — curious what auditable human–AI mathematics looks like from the inside. Every step we claim, you can check: walk the first provenance trail, then take the seat.
Atlanta, GA
Read from the center out. Thicker rings = growth years.
Former dendrochronologist. The domain name had to mean something.