Zhi An / Project-led consulting
Start with the work.
Build what helps.
Practical AI begins with understanding the workflow: what people need to do, what software can handle, and where judgment belongs.
Explore the projects ↗People
Software
AI
↓
A working system
01 / Selected work
Projects as a
starting point.
Three connected areas of work: task-focused applications, explicit authority, and specialized learning. Each explores a different part of building useful systems.
Application developmentFirstPrinciplesAccounting
Accounting organized around the task at hand.
FirstPrinciplesAccounting is being developed around focused accounting workflows. The aim is to bring the relevant business context, permissions, and actions into a mobile-friendly experience.
The consulting connection
Begin with a real business task, then decide which steps belong to people, deterministic software, or AI. This project provides a concrete setting for discussing workflow design and the boundaries of automation.
Authorization architectureCBAC
Make authority part of the workflow.
Context-Based Access Control explores authorization through explicit runtime context. The service direction builds on patterns that emerged in FirstPrinciplesAccounting: scoped access, default-deny decisions, and explainable authorization.
The consulting connection
As applications and agents gain the ability to act, their authority needs clear boundaries. CBAC offers a basis for examining who can do what, in which context, and how that decision can be explained.
Research / ExperimentalBwNN
Explore specialized ways to learn.
Black and White Neural Networks is a research project exploring non-floating-point learning ideas. It asks how alternative representations and learning approaches might support more specialized systems.
The consulting connection
The research opens a broader design question: when does a task need a general model, and when could a smaller, specialized approach fit better? This is exploratory work; no performance advantage is claimed.
02 / Approach
The workflow comes first.
I’m Zhi An, building The Oriented Inc. around practical work with software and AI. These projects are a way to examine the decisions behind an application, from how work gets done to how authority and knowledge are represented.
One consulting direction is Design-in-Production: helping designers and developers work directly with production code using AI coding agents. The starting point is a specific workflow and a clearly scoped problem.
03 / Writing
Ideas from the work.
A collection of postings will be added here, connecting project experience with lessons about workflows, AI, and software design.