AI product engineering, evals, HCI

I turn ambiguous ideas into AI products people can use, inspect, and trust.

I'm Tianrun, also known as Roderick. I'm a product builder: I define the problem, design the workflow, ship the system, and measure whether it worked.

Formerly SUSTech CSE, now a master's student at CMU Silicon Valley.

See work 1k+ stars Photographs 400k+ views
Studio portrait of Tianrun Qiu against a grey backdrop
Shenzhen to Silicon Valley

The work shaping how I build.

Recent products, work I've already shipped, and the research and deployments that shaped how I work.

Recent work

Two products, learning, sport

Fluentide

Language learning, applied AIfrom 2026

Graded Chinese listening from real news, with synced pinyin and translation. Web, iOS, and podcasts.

  • I shipped the learning loop, so stories, audio, and vocabulary all match each learner's HSK level.
  • Episode production runs as an agent workflow I codified: an LLM reviewer strips out the English and reads each script's Chinese on its own, flagging lines no native speaker would say, and vocabulary is checked against the level before any audio is made.

2,000+ learners, 1,400+ episodes, 30% return within 7 days

Experience product

ParroTao

Amateur training, agent systemsfrom 2025

An AI coach for amateur athletes. It reads their training data and writes plans they can understand and change. Chinese beta.

  • I own the agent — tools over activity data, a coach that proposes and revises plans — and built the evaluation harness that caught it inventing workouts and features it lacked, fixed by grounding every claim in evidence.
  • I built most of the product it sits in — activity import, planning, teams, the workspace.

200+ users Agent in a real training product

Beta (Chinese)

Selected work

Product engineering, open source

Atoms

Product Engineer Intern, MetaGPT / DeepWisdom

Agent platform, product engineeringFeb-May 2026

Let people and external agents create, iterate, and deploy applications through an interface they can trust.

  • I took Atoms CLI from 0→1, giving coding agents a direct path to create, inspect, validate, and deploy applications; it shipped internally, with two internal tools running on it.
  • I defined a full-stack data workspace so non-technical builders could inspect and update app data without SQL.
  • The platform was charging users to repair its own agent's mistakes — 34% of bug-fix requests — so I made the case for tiered pricing.

Shipped data workspace in the product, CLI in internal use

Experience product

wnr

Creator

Open source, desktop product2019-present

A cross-platform timer that makes breaks harder to skip while keeping its rules transparent.

  • I designed it for Windows, macOS, and Linux around transparent rules and explicit user control.
  • Seven years on, it's multilingual, still maintained, and kept alive by contributors I've never met in person.

1,000+ GitHub stars, 83 releases, #3 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

View project

Research and deployment

Cultural AI, factory-floor AI

HarmonyCut

HCI Researcher, SUSTech

Creativity, culture, AIACM CHI 2025

An AI-assisted paper-cutting tool that helps creators work with cultural symbolism, not shape alone.

  • I designed a system that connects visual form with cultural meaning, then evaluated it in a 16-person study.
  • We published it as a full paper at ACM CHI 2025, where I'm co-first author and co-presented the oral talk in Yokohama.

CHI '25 61% easier to find patterns, 2.5× easier to edit

Read paper

Lika production system

AI Forward Deployed Engineer (Contract), Hangzhou Lika Rigging

Industrial AI, deployed systemAug 2022-Oct 2023

A computer-vision defect-detection system that learned from normal production samples and ran in real time on low-cost edge hardware.

  • I co-led it, pairing normal-only anomaly detection with a dashboard I shaped by watching the factory floor.
  • I optimized the vision pipeline for real-time inference on roughly $40 of hardware and deployed it across 20 loom stations, where operators clear defects and managers watch production status.

Granted patent 20 loom stations, $40 edge hardware

How I got here.

SUSTech computer science, now CMU Silicon Valley.

Education

Aug 2026-present

Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley

Master's degree, Mountain View, CA

  • Graduate student focused on applied AI, product management, and software engineering.
  • Winner, NewsBreak × CMU-SV ECE Hackathon (AI agents).

Aug 2022-Jun 2026

Southern University of Science and Technology

B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

  • Graduated with highest honors.
  • School Motto Scholarship, top 0.2%.
  • M. Kuok Scholarship, top 4%.

When I'm not at a computer, I'm usually behind a camera.

Selected by Pixabay editors. 15+ editor choices, 400k+ views.