Yuyu Shen — Build With Why

I'm Yuyu. I build things, research things, and have a hard time leaving interesting questions alone. A lot of the questions I keep coming back to are about technology and human agency: what we should trust, what 'better' actually means, and how we build technology that helps people make better choices and stronger connections without quietly taking the human part away.

Building

Hopperlace helps people and organizations choose AI based on real-world fit: system reliability, human-centered design and oversight, and the institutions, incentives and values behind the systems we use. Today, Hopperlace means expert-led evaluation and consulting, testing systems against a team’s actual tasks, failure costs and capacity for oversight rather than a leaderboard. Alongside it, Value Compass is an early public prototype of a future values layer, exploring how ownership, incentives and power can factor into decisions. Over time, the aim is a repeatable product — a methodology and decision layer teams can use themselves as models and needs keep moving.

MyCorner is designed to help people find where they belong and build stronger connections with the people, places, businesses and communities around them. Neighbourhood discovery is the first thing you can use, not the end of the idea. The larger vision is local belonging: repeated connections between neighbours, local businesses and nearby activity.

Value Compass is an early public expression of the broader Hopperlace philosophy: making the institutions, incentives, power and values behind AI systems visible enough to become part of how we choose technology.

Research

  • Deference-Aware Evaluation for Human-in-the-Loop AI Systems — poster, Technical AI Governance Research workshop, ICML 2026
  • Current exploration: whether AI model behavioural fingerprints persist under different personas
  • Frontier AI Governance Map

Small builds

  • StayCool London — a crowdsourced map of air-conditioned places in London, built during extreme heatwaves.
  • Evidence Synthesis AI

Writing

  • What kind of human world do we build for the age of AI? — March 2026, originally published at kallidao.com/philosophy

Contact

  • Email: buildwithwhy@gmail.com
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

For an AI-friendly site summary, see /llms.txt.