Ishan Shah
Founding engineer building LLM-powered web agents
ishan
San Francisco, California, United States
Joined March 2024
Network
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Summary
At Happenstance, Ishan is a founding engineer working on cutting-edge product and infrastructure leveraging LLMs to create innovative consumer luck and assistant experiences, combining advanced LLM/agent research with practical product feature delivery. ishanshah+1
Focus on multimodal LLM agents and web browsing: Ishan builds open-source experiments that let vision-capable LLMs interact with the web (vimGPT), exploring how tools like Vimium and Playwright can give models reliable click/interaction affordances. His work has been covered in technology press and cited in discussions about next-generation AI assistants. github+3
Active open-source maintainer and educator: Ishan publishes substantial public projects and teaching materials (for example, a Real Analysis textbook with source and PDF), showing strengths in both rigorous math/CS foundations and practical engineering. He uses GitHub to host research/code and maintains a portfolio that catalogs many small-to-medium projects. github+2
Early-career engineer with diverse industry internships and startup founding experience: his resume spans fraud-detection and ML/infra internships (Capital One, YouTube), ML/TTS research and internships (Unreal Speech, Minion AI), a short software role at Bloomberg focused on earnings analysis, and founding-engineer experience at Happenstance—indicating strengths in systems, ML infrastructure, and product-facing LLM work. thenetwork+2
Builds tooling and productivity-focused web utilities: his public portfolio shows many small utilities (e.g., arXiv autolink, engblogs summarizer, Hermes Mail) and experiments that combine pragmatic automation with LLMs—demonstrating a pattern of shipping developer-facing tools and usability-focused experiments. ishanshah+1
Work
Education
Projects
Writing
My real analysis textbook
January 1, 2022Course notes / textbook for Real Analysis (M 361K) authored by Ishan; includes TeX source and PDF (used as a public study/text resource).
Productivity Stack
October 30, 2023An evergreen note describing tools, workflows, and setups Ishan uses to stay productive across projects and learning.
Textbooks
October 30, 2023Notes on textbooks and teaching resources, including the Real Analysis textbook and other long-form learning materials.
Getting LLMs to output JSON
November 3, 2023A practical note on techniques and prompts for getting large language models to reliably produce structured JSON outputs.
Startups to Follow
January 27, 2024A curated list of startups and early-stage companies Ishan recommends following, with short notes on why they stand out.
Hobbies
Building side projects and open-source tools (particularly LLM/agent experiments and developer tooling); maintains a portfolio of projects. ishanshah+1
Music (listed on personal site). ishanshah
Running and trail running for fitness and enjoyment of nature.
Rock climbing and bouldering as outdoor physical challenges and recreation.
Other outdoor activities including hiking and exploration to stay active and engaged with nature.
Notes
AEAndrew Edwardssaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
consistently deliver outstanding work as a software engineer.Jan 28, 2026
ATAlex Teichmansaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
consistently deliver outstanding work as a software engineer.Jan 27, 2026
Jan 25, 2026
ATAlex Teichmansaid that if they had a challenging AI problem to solve,
ISIshan Shah
would be among their first picks to work with.Jan 22, 2026
ATAlex Teichmansaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
solve challenging AI problems in a way that made a big impact.Jan 22, 2026
ATAlex Teichmansaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
make a significant impact on AI projects at their company.Jan 22, 2026
ASAadit Shahsaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
make a big positive impact on AI work or projects in their experience.Jan 20, 2026
ASAadit Shahsaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive young professionals they've seen from UT Austin.Jan 6, 2026
Dec 16, 2025
Dec 3, 2025
Nov 28, 2025
Nov 26, 2025
RBRituraj Bhattsaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the best backend or infrastructure engineers they've worked with.Nov 25, 2025
PMPavlos Morossaid that if they had a tough AI engineering project,
ISIshan Shah
would be among their first picks to tackle it.Nov 18, 2025
Nov 17, 2025
PMPavlos Morossaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive founding engineers they've known in the AI space.Nov 15, 2025
Nov 14, 2025
DGDylan Gosssaid
ISIshan Shah
has taken on challenging forward-deployed engineering roles and thrived.Nov 7, 2025
PMPavlos Morossaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive applied AI engineers they've worked with.Nov 5, 2025
PMPavlos Morossaid
ISIshan Shah
has made a noticeable positive impact on engineering teams they've worked with.Nov 3, 2025
ATAlex Teichmansaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive early-career engineers they've worked with recently.Oct 22, 2025
PMPavlos Morossaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive early-career engineers they've worked with recently.Oct 22, 2025
DBDaniel Byshkinsaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive early-career engineers they've worked with recently.Oct 22, 2025
JFJosh Faustsaid
ISIshan Shah
is one of the most impressive engineers they've worked with on AI-powered or distributed systems projects.Jul 30, 2025
AEAndrew Edwardssaid they've seen
ISIshan Shah
play a founding or core role in building out AI infrastructure at their company.Jul 2, 2025