W.P. McNeill

Big picture, dirty hands.

I build natural language systems. Linguistics and philosophy inform how I think about them—meaning, context, what these models are doing when they appear to understand.

I've spent my career in AI startups, building systems that have to work in the real world. I care about clean code, clear thinking, and understanding the problem before solving it.

Corner Cases is my Substack on AI and language, co-written with Claude—an experiment in collaboration and a place to work through questions that don't fit elsewhere.

Category theory and the Lean theorem prover are ongoing interests. Formal foundations matter, and they're underexplored in how we think about language and computation.