Richard Hess — eswat2, April 2026
Principal UI/UX Architect with 40+ years building interfaces — from Xerox Lisp Machines and SGI to modern web, MCP, and AI-assisted platforms. Career began in 1985 at Teknowledge on expert systems, the first commercial AI wave, before pivoting into UI work through the browser wars at Netscape, rich internet apps at Sapias, and a decade at Demandbase. Five years at Cox Automotive (2019–2026) defined portfolio-scale UI architecture and culminated in a YAML-driven declarative UI platform orchestrated by five specialized MCP servers. Currently Principal Architect UI/UX at Shield Legal LLC.
The thread running through all of it is a preference for inspectable, deterministic systems — spec-first UIs, action–state patterns, and web components where agents and humans use the same runtime. That sensibility traces back to knowledge engineering in the 1980s: encoding human expertise into inference structures is closer to mechanical design than conventional programming, and a mechanical engineering degree (Rose-Hulman, cum laude) kept the architecture grounded in real-world constraints and failure modes.
Outside of work: long walks, video games, TTRPGs, and all things sci-fi and space.
"Make the machine meet the human halfway, stay inspectable."