John Fite

About

Infrastructure engineer. AI systems builder. Independent creator.

Systems under pressure — people, machines, and institutions forced to act with incomplete information, conflicting incentives, and consequences that cannot always be replayed.

I'm John Fite. I build software, AI experiments, strategy games, music, and long-form analytical work. The forms change; the through-line does not.

Professionally, I come from enterprise infrastructure and systems engineering. My current direction is applied AI engineering, with a particular interest in agentic workflows, evaluation, retrieval, secure tool use, observability, and the human controls required to move AI from an impressive demonstration to a system worth trusting.

Games
Fog of war, asymmetric information, and decisions under uncertainty.
Apps
Disciplined interfaces with everything nonessential stripped away.
Writing
First-principles frameworks tested against evidence and adversarial criticism.
AI work
A harder question: does the system actually do what the human authorized — or merely something close enough to pass at a glance?

I served in Marine infantry, spent nearly a decade in Japan as an educator, and later returned to the United States to build a career in technology.

It is not a conventional route, but every chapter trained the same instincts: clarify the objective, understand the environment, reduce ambiguity, build for failure, and keep human judgment where it matters. Those instincts now run through everything in this hub.

John Fite, left, and his swim buddy Rocco DiPofi standing in camouflage and equipment on Kin Blue Beach, Okinawa, at sunset in 1995 before a nighttime Zodiac mission during Scout Swimmer School.
Kin Blue Beach, Okinawa, 1995. My swim buddy Rocco DiPofi and I were near the end of Scout Swimmer School, exhausted after two weeks of training and preparing to board the Zodiacs for a night mission. I’m on the left.

AI changed the scale of what I could build independently. Using frontier models as coding partners, researchers, critics, adversarial reviewers, and production tools, I have shipped an iOS app, three playable games, original game soundtracks, standalone albums, and a growing catalog of analytical work.

The range is deliberate. This is not a gallery of prompts or a collection of unrelated hobbies. Each project tests whether an idea can be carried from concept through architecture, production, evaluation, and release.

AI multiplies the labor. I retain the direction, judgment, verification, and responsibility. The Lab marks the next phase: building not only with AI, but around it.

Conceptual illustration showing AI-generated actions flowing through evaluation gates, trust boundaries, verification steps, and human approval before reaching real-world systems.
Sentinel Protocol Lab
Authorization, evaluation, and trust boundaries for agents capable of affecting external systems.
Tiny LLM Lab
First-principles understanding of language models, retrieval, and evaluation through inspectable experiments.
Project Euclid
Whether AI-assisted research can preserve a verifiable chain from conjecture to proof.

The standard is simple: build something real, make the assumptions visible, test where it breaks, and leave behind an artifact another person can inspect.

AI helped forge the artifact. I own the blade.

This site is the permanent public record of the work: live releases, experiments, essays, soundtracks, and the lessons carried from one project into the next.

Start with the Lab for the direction of travel. Start with Games, Music, Apps, or Writing for evidence that the work ships.

Explore
LabAppsGamesWritingMusic
Connect
GitHub ↗Emailitch.io ↗

Colophon: how the Artifact Hub is built →