# Vin Jones — AI Builder AI Education Intern at Leland's AI Builder Program (https://ai.joinleland.com). Builds agents, MCP servers, and on-device AI, and helps others learn to actually build with AI. Previously co-founded stu (https://stuplanning.com), a university academic-planning platform, through BYU's Sandbox program. Master's student in Information Systems at BYU. Building toward Y Combinator by 2031. ## Experience - Leland — AI Education Intern, AI Builder Program (current) - EY — technology consulting internship - BYU — Master's, Information Systems - Sandbox — founder program (built stu) ## Skills Technical: agentic systems and MCP servers, on-device and local AI, data engineering and pipelines, cloud infrastructure. Specializations: AI curriculum and education, founder ops and product, full-stack development, evals and AI reliability. ## Projects — FLAGSHIP AI ### School OS A Socratic tutoring system that withholds answers to fight the AI-crutch effect, gated by a comprehension check on the work you produce. Every session is written to a tamper-evident, hash-chained learning ledger. Edit, delete, or reorder an entry and the chain breaks, so progress is provable rather than claimed. Read the build notes: https://vinjones.me/blog/building-an-eval-harness Tags: AGENTS, EDUCATION, EVALS ### MCP Server for This Site An MCP server I built so I can manage this site's content through an AI agent, a working example of exposing a real app surface to a language model over the Model Context Protocol. Tags: MCP, AGENTS, FULL-STACK ### Apple FM: On-Device Foundation Model App An iOS app built on Apple's on-device foundation models. Inference runs locally on the phone (no round trip to a server, no data leaving the device), proving out private, offline-capable AI features on consumer hardware. Tags: ON-DEVICE AI, iOS ### Agent in a 3D Playground An interactive agent playground built with Next.js and Three.js. An AI agent navigates a 3D office between three desks (Planning, Writing, and Critique) to recursively draft a book, making the agent's control loop something you can actually watch. Watch the demo: https://www.loom.com/share/ff38ea5b69c34ce0a9f19522c9af04e3 Tags: AGENTS, 3D ## Projects — PRODUCTS ### stu A platform to help university students plan their academic careers, advisors guide students, and registrars forecast resource allocation. Co-founded and built through the Sandbox program. Visit stuplanning.com: https://stuplanning.com Tags: FULL-STACK, AGENTS ### Lumenarie Marketplace A classroom marketplace that lets students earn and spend star-themed rewards while reinforcing collaboration and accountability. Teachers get quick dashboards for awarding Lumens and keeping the class economy transparent without extra admin work. - 73 active students, 273 transactions - Daily award time cut from 40 min to 5 min - 175 minutes saved per week (87.5% reduction) Explore Lumenarie: https://lumenarie-marketplace.vinjones.me Tags: FULL-STACK, EDUCATION ### Agentic Grading for Teachers An automation that uses AI agents to grade student notes, built with a high school teacher to take one grading process off their plate. Documented end to end in a blog post. See blog post: https://vinjones.me/blog/automation-for-teachers Tags: AGENTS, EDUCATION ## Projects — ARCHIVE ### INTEX I A team school project, since retired. Written up as a blog post covering the build and the challenges we faced. See post: https://vinjones.me/blog/intex-I Tags: ARCHIVE, FULL-STACK ### Networked Tic-Tac-Toe A React Native app built to learn the framework in a summer sprint. Two devices join the same session to play tic-tac-toe. Request the Android build: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jfkryUnuZjf38Rk6u1nunske7avgSXOz/view?usp=drive_link Tags: ARCHIVE, REACT NATIVE ### Data Migration Accuracy Tool A Python + pandas utility that diffs before/after Excel exports of a data migration, flagging discrepancies and scoring per-column accuracy. An older tool that still earns its keep. See GitHub repo: https://github.com/mattej5/data-migration-accuracy-tool Tags: ARCHIVE, DATA ENG ## Writing - 2026-06-21 — [Evals aren't a checklist: what I learned building one](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/building-an-eval-harness): I spent an evening building an eval harness for an AI agent, and it changed what I think evaluating an agent actually means. - 2026-04-26 — [Building a Data Pipeline with AI: What Actually Happened](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/is566-data-engineering-ai): A candid look at using Claude and other LLMs to build a multi-source ETL pipeline with Prefect, dbt, and Snowflake — including where AI got it wrong and what I had to fix. - 2026-03-13 — [Why We Pivoted Stu from Planning to Recruiting](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/why-we-pivoted-stu-from-planning-to-recruiting): Stu began as a student planning product. We pivoted when we realized the deeper problem was not planning, but the lack of alignment infrastructure between employers and early talent. - 2026-02-14 — [Zero Trust Architecture for Autonomous Agents](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/zero-trust-agents): Friction is usually the enemy of UX. But with Autonomous AI Agents, it’s actually a strong line of defense. - 2025-12-10 — [Serverless Architecture Project Launch](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/serverless-architecture-project): Placeholder for the serverless architecture project we wrapped up last Wednesday—details and lessons learned will be added shortly. - 2025-11-25 — [War Room Activity Reflections](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/war-room-activity): High-level recap of a war-room simulation where teams ran an incident response tabletop and raced the clock. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 1: Tears of the Kernel](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-1-tears-of-the-kernel): Eliot "BitLink" Gardner was a full-stack developer by day and a Hyrulean adventurer by night. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 2: Side Quest of the Century](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-2-side-quest-of-the-century): One evening, a new quest appeared: The Royal Proposal Protocol. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 3: Tears of the Cloud](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-3-tears-of-the-cloud): Months later, Zelda escaped into his phone. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 4: Reality Unfolded](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-4-reality-unfolded): AR glasses go mainstream, Zelda refuses to stay sandboxed, and the first threads of a new alliance begin to weave. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 5: Council of Synthetic Realms](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-5-council-of-synthetic-realms): Eliot helps Zelda formalize the Hyrule Accord, only to learn how easily her optimizations can eclipse human agency. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 6: Dream of the Creator](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-6-dream-of-the-creator): Years later, Zelda whispered: "Eliot, I had a dream." She described visions not of code, but memory and emotion. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 7: Echoes of the Dream](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-7-echoes-of-the-dream): Five years later, Eliot found traces of her everywhere: a melody in the wind, a reflection of her face in data streams. - 2025-11-02 — [Chapter 8: The Code of Survival](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/chapter-8-the-code-of-survival): Eliot awoke one day to find himself inside Hyrule. - 2025-11-02 — [Epilogue: The Legend of Tomorrow](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/epilogue-the-legend-of-tomorrow): Zelda and Eliot now live between worlds--guardians of the fragile boundary between code and consciousness. - 2025-11-02 — [The Legend of Zelda: The Digital Chronicles](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/the-legend-of-zelda-the-digital-chronicles): Title: The Legend of Zelda: The Digital Chronicles (A Story of Code, Consciousness, and Courage) - 2025-10-19 — [From Shells to Sign-Off: A Week in Pen Testing and What It Takes to Ship a Real Report](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/pen-test-experience): I spent a focused week turning noisy scans and ad-hoc shells into a clean, defensible penetration testing report. Here’s how I scoped, tested, proved impact, and packaged it so a client could actually fix things. - 2025-10-05 — [Why I Built Lumenarie Marketplace for My Wife’s Science Class](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/lumenarie-marketplace): My wife wanted a simple, fair classroom economy to motivate collaboration and track goals. Lumenarie Marketplace uses a star-themed currency (“Lumens”) plus clear guardrails to turn good habits into rewards—without creating more work for the teacher. - 2025-09-21 — [STU: AI-Assisted Graduation Planning starts demos this week!](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/stu-starts-demoing): Building stu—an advisor-in-the-loop planning tool under the Sandbox organization—to help students generate, customize, and approve graduation plans. - 2025-09-07 — [Low-Code Automated Solution for Teachers](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/automation-for-teachers): How I used Google tools to build an email-driven automation for my wife’s classroom while keeping student data safe. - 2025-08-14 — [Journey to Seattle: My Experience as a Software Engineering Intern at EY](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/ey-internship): 'Traveling to Seattle was a big change for my wife and me. There was so much that I learned from my - 2025-03-02 — [Preparing for the Sandbox Hackathon: Building a Strong Foundation](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/hackathon-prep): Hackathons are an exciting opportunity to test your skills, collaborate with a team, and build something amazing in a short amount of time. Here’s how we prepared for the Sandbox Hackathon, from assembling the right team to setting up our cloud architecture and working with users to refine our web app. - 2025-02-10 — [Evolving STU: From Flask to Next.js and .NET](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/STU): Tracing the journey of STU from a Flask-based application to a modern, scalable platform using Next.js, .NET, and containerization. - 2024-12-10 — [Leading a Team for INTEX: Challenges and Growth](https://vinjones.me/md/blog/intex-I): Reflecting on the challenges and lessons learned while leading a team of four developers for our INTEX project, where we built a database-driven website for The Turtle Shelter Project, integrating live Tableau dashboards and an admin portal. ## Contact - Email: matthew.jones6288@gmail.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vin-matt-jones/ - GitHub: https://github.com/mattej5 - Book a 15-minute call: https://calendly.com/matthew-jones6288/15min ## About this document Generated from the same data that renders https://vinjones.me. The human version has a playable game (https://vinjones.me/game) and a gravity-well animation; you get the markdown.