creators

swyx (Shawn Wang): AI Engineer and Latent Space

Shawn 'swyx' Wang named the AI Engineer role, runs the AI Engineer conferences as cofounder and CEO, writes Latent Space and joined Cognition in 2025.

Shawn Wang, who goes by swyx, is a writer and community builder, a Singaporean in San Francisco. AI Engineer's leadership page lists him as its cofounder and CEO and says he contributes to evaluation standards for coding agents at Cognition. He began in quantitative finance and led developer relations at AWS, Netlify, Temporal and Airbyte. In June 2023 he published "The Rise of the AI Engineer" on Latent Space, arguing that a research team's work could now be done with API docs and an afternoon. With Ben Dunphy he turned it into the AI Engineer Summit, first held in October 2023 and sold out; the World's Fair drew over 3,000 people in June 2024. Latent Space, the newsletter and podcast he writes and hosts, has passed 201,000 subscribers. In September 2025 he wrote that he was joining Cognition with most of his company Smol AI, keeping AI Engineer and Latent Space independent of it; his title there has not been announced.

Specialization

AI engineering, developer relations, technical writing, conferences and podcasts

Country

United States