Ishan Shah
Founding engineer building LLM-powered web agents and tools
ishan
San Francisco, California, United States
15.1K connections
Joined March 2024
Summary
At Happenstance, Ishan is a founding design 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
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