Rashid Azarang

About — A profile

Continually exploring new ways of expressing ideas through design and code.

Rashid Azarang·Independent·Monterrey, Mexico·Working since 2014

The short version

I’m a builder, an artist, and a thinkerer working at the intersection of software, operations, and intelligence. I’ve led engineering teams, shipped product across logistics, sales, healthcare, and education, and spent the last few years building tools that help small teams act with the clarity of much larger ones.

Before turning 30, I scaled a COVID-19 testing platform from 1,000 to 100,000+ tests per month for a Spanish laboratory across Mexico and the Dominican Republic, ran a 60-person distributed sales team for a US client from two operators in Monterrey, and led growth experiments that returned 1,876% on ad spend. The pattern under all of it: the same operational shape, in different industries.

Now I split my time between building product, publishing research, writing, and making cinematic short films, purposely trying to answer: how does intelligence become usable, and how do you prove it? The research half is public: pre-registered experiments on production agent systems, with the first paper published as an open preprint.

Now

What I’m working on this season.

  • Agent research. Pre-registered studies of how AI agents remember and retrieve, run against production systems. First paper published: Reading More, Finding Less, with data and harness shipped for re-running.
  • Engineering economics. Strategic Technical Debt ↗ prices deliberate technical debt as a call option on the validated product. Preprint on arXiv; the two primary tests are pre-registered with their analyzers frozen, and running them is the next act.
  • Mentu. An operating system for agentic work. Local-first recipes, a commitment ledger, and an MCP intelligence layer. Open source. mentu.ai ↗
  • Recreating Stories. New cinematic episodes about lost civilizations. Most recent: Tang Dynasty’s Last Beautiful Year ↗.
  • AyudaLocal. Solving home services in Mexico with AI. The right pro shows up, payment handled, every step coordinated. ayudalocal.com ↗
  • The Architecture of Usable Intelligence. The third book in the cognitive-infrastructure series. The recursive engine underneath the other two. Read draft →

Stance

What I work from.

  1. 01

    Build tools that work and feel great.

    Half of "feels great" is taste. The other half is keeping the seams visible so the user can repair the thing themselves.

  2. 02

    Treat Notion status fields as unreliable.

    The metadata of any system is always more flattering than the thing itself. Read the body, not the tag.

  3. 03

    Ship the cinematic version.

    A portfolio is permission to imagine. If the work is finished and the page is a list, the work disappears.

  4. 04

    Write everything down.

    Memory is a single point of failure. So is reputation. Documents survive both.

Colophon

How this site is made.

Built with Next.js on Vercel. Essays, books, case studies, and the research paper are authored in Notion and synced to local markdown via a small sync tool I wrote (notion-to-site ↗). Typography is EB Garamond paired with Inter. The whole corpus is machine-readable at /llms.txt and /api/context.

Get in touch.

For work, collaborations, or anything you read here that you want to argue with.