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Senior AI Engineer · Microsoft

Jacob Centner

I build AI systems that have to survive production — Azure AI at Microsoft by day, autonomous agents building real products on my own time. I write about what holds up and what breaks, with receipts.

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Featured Work

What I'm Building

TSGBuilder

Multi-agent pipeline that writes troubleshooting guides for Azure AI support engineers.

70–80% reduction in guide-authoring time; rolling out across Microsoft support engineering.

Multi-AgentPythonAzure AIMicrosoft Foundry

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Agentic Quartz

An AI assistant for individual real-estate agents that works across the tools where a deal already lives.

Per-cycle cost cut from ~$0.10 to under $0.01 with a custom multi-tier memory system. In private beta with working agents.

TypeScriptMulti-AgentAgent SafetySemantic Search

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WyoClear

Wyoming legislature tracker — find legislators, track bills, see votes.

Hundreds of active users, profitable on donations, shipped in ~30 hours.

PythonAI AgentsCivic TechFull Stack

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Copilot Autonomous Template

Open-source workflow that makes GitHub Copilot build coherently across long autonomous sessions.

v1.0.0 shipped — hook-verified stage machine, 160 hook tests, 10 ADRs. Used to build WyoClear, Sentinel, and this site.

GitHub CopilotAutonomous AgentsDeveloper ToolsOpen Source

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Writing

Recent Posts

Someone Sold the Loading Spinner

kickbacks.ai turned the Claude Code spinner into an ad auction, and a whole economy assembled itself around it in about a day. Notes on the strangest new market in software, and the thing I'm building on top of it.

Giving an Agent Your Inbox: A Permission Model That Isn't a Prompt

I gave an AI agent access to a realtor's live inbox, calendar, and files. The boundaries that make that sane live in code and OAuth scopes, not in a sentence the model is asked to respect.

Eight Years of Teaching a Dinosaur to Jump

Three rebuilds of the same toy RL problem, eight years apart — and what the fastest, smartest, AI-built one taught me about trusting my own numbers.

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About

About Me

I work on Azure AI at Microsoft, where I help enterprise customers build and debug production AI systems. Before that, I co-founded a startup and built communications intelligence from zero. My wife and I live in the mountains of Wyoming with our two absurdly fluffy cats, where she teaches BJJ and I hike and play cello.

Want to chat about tech, a project, or a role? Reach out.

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