# Shawn Price

## About Me

I'm an [agentic engineer](/blog/2026/03/09/agentic-engineering), technical founder, and coach with 20+ years of experience building open source software and startups.

I build production ML pipelines, LLM extraction systems, and AI-powered web applications. I help individuals and teams build fluency with AI tools.

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

## Current Work

- Co-founder of [Centerline](https://centerline.work)
- Volunteer Product Builder with [Build Canada](https://buildcanada.com)

## Recent Projects

### [BFFM-XGB](https://github.com/sprice/bffm-xgb)

XGBoost ML model pipeline for Big Five personality scoring from sparse IPIP-BFFM responses.

Public Domain models are hosted on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/shawnprice/bffm-xgb).

[Take the assessment](https://big5.shawnprice.com/) and share your results or chat about them with your favourite LLM.

### [Whisp](https://usewhisp.com)

Create, discover, test and share LLM prompts.

### [Canada Spends](https://canadaspends.com/en)

Collaborated with the Head of Engineering at [Build Canada](https://buildcanada.com) to create a PDF/LLM extraction pipeline that processed roughly 11,000 semi-structured government documents, using Pydantic and Instructor to manage structured LLM outputs from irregular documents.

### [Kopi](https://github.com/sprice/kopi)

Mac OS clipboard manager built with Rust and GPUI.

### [Federal Workbench](https://workbench.buildcanada.com)

I built this bilingual AI/RAG chat application as a [Build Canada](https://buildcanada.com) project. It queries and understands Canadian Federal Parliament and Legislation data, with inline viewing of Legislation and Bills. Open source on [GitHub](https://github.com/sprice/federal-workbench).

## Notable

- Trained [Co-Active](https://coactive.com) coach
- Placed top 20 out of ~500 in the [8090](https://8090.ai) [Top Coder Challenge](https://x.com/chamath/status/1931395477217660944)

## Quotes

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