Jim Tisdale

About

Seven-plus years of frontend, then the model showed up.

I'm Jim Tisdale, agent engineer in Charlotte. The first seven-plus years were production frontend, four and a half of them at Mediavine building Journey (the publisher-onboarding product) and the analytics dashboards thousands of publishers work in. Since late 2025 the work has been the agent layer itself: two npm packages, a set of enforcement hooks, and a cognitive architecture running live. All of it public. All of it source-linked.

Receipts

Trajectory

Full history

  1. 2019 – 20

    Legal Associations Management

    Full Stack Developer → Team Lead

    Team Lead in 9 months; shipped a Node badge service that cut $22.5K/yr on a 10,000+-member platform.

  2. 2020 – 21

    TEKsystems

    React Developer (contract)

    React contract; built components for the shared library and gave an internal talk on generic component design.

  3. 2021 – 26

    Mediavine

    Software Engineer III

    Built the Journey onboarding product from the ground up; de facto AI-tooling lead by the end.

  4. 2025 – now

    Sylphie Labs

    AI / Agent Engineer

    memory-pkg and codebase-pkg on npm; Sylphie live at sylphie.live.

Method

Not a productivity hack: the way the work gets built.

Discipline

The discipline half.

Every pull request on my main project merges only after review against a written architecture document. My own code first. That standard became the enforcement hooks: a line-level reviewer on every write, an intent-level check at every stop, Playwright verification required rather than optional. The agent doesn't get to grade its own work. Neither do I.

Patience

The patience half.

Adoption is people work. At Mediavine I was one of four engineers on an eleven-person team who took agent tooling seriously early; by the end, other ICs routed their tooling questions to me, and the R&D program I started made the exploration official. The unglamorous parts matter most: pairing with the engineer who hasn't found their workflow yet, writing the rollout doc nobody wants to own, taking the meeting with the skeptic.

Open to

Forward Deployed Engineer, specifically.

The job is taking Claude into another company's engineering org and getting it into production. The play I ran for one team at Mediavine, now at org scale. Agent Engineer and AI-harnessed Frontend Developer are the same job from different angles; I'm open to all three.

Also open to

  1. Agent Engineer
  2. AI-harnessed Frontend Developer
Email me

Off-hours

Three kids, JLPT flashcards, and half-finished songs. Same patience, different instruments.