TOM HUMPLIKNow AI/ML rapid prototyping · National Reconnaissance Office

Building
what AI
makes possible.

I lead a roughly 40-person AI/ML rapid-prototyping organization at the National Reconnaissance Office. Across about 15 concurrent efforts, we build analytical systems for an enormous and fragmented intelligence data ecosystem.

Leading that work means knowing the tools firsthand. I use the same models, agents, coding tools, and architectures I ask others to adopt, then turn what fails into constraints, tests, and better technical decisions.

Outside that role, I test the same questions against working software: public systems, shipped apps, one product that failed to find its audience, and prototypes still earning a verdict.

The work

SELECTED WORK / 01—09

Two featured systems, two shipped products, a concluded experiment, four in the lab.

Featured systems01—02 · What a model can and cannot be trusted with
01AI system · Web · 2026

Analysis Workbench

Ask a question about flight data in plain English and get the dashboard that answers it. The model chooses the analysis. It never computes a number and it never draws a component.

It plans in a closed vocabulary — 16 deterministic analytics operations, 11 frozen widget types, one Zod-validated object — over a single MCP server. Every value on screen comes from ordinary tested code, and a boundary test fails the build if anything downstream learns what a flight is.

Systems architecture · LLM planning · A model that never owns the math

How I built it
Analysis Workbench answering 'show departures from IAD over the last 7 days by hour and aircraft type' with stat tiles and a departures-by-hour line chart
A QUESTION IN. A DASHBOARD OUT.
A live dashboard plotting which US-outbound aircraft are currently over water, as dots on a dark world map
OR A LIVE QUESTION, ANSWERED LIVE.
02Open source · Developer tool · Public

ask-gpt

Everything here is built with an agent, which leaves one blind spot: the thing that wrote the code is also the thing telling me it works. ask-gpt is one command inside Claude Code that hands the work to a different model for an adversarial read — no API key, no shared account.

The review path never sees the first model’s account of what it did, only the task and the code. A reviewer who has read the closing argument is not a second opinion. The rest of the work is less glamorous and more important: measuring what actually leaves the machine, and knowing when to stop asking.

Second-model review · Transcript-blind · Deep test suite

Shipped products03—04 · Live in the App Store
03

Shipped · iPhone · 2026

Gridiron Guesser

A daily NFL career guessing game built around a deceptively simple idea: read the route, name the player. Four downs, three game modes, and a reason to come back tomorrow.

Product design · Game systems · A daily video content machine

Gridiron Guesser product screenshot 1
Gridiron Guesser product screenshot 2
Gridiron Guesser product screenshot 3
04

Shipped · iPhone + iPad · 2026

Tooth Fairy Radar

A playful night-time tracker that turns losing a tooth into an event. Parents stage the magic; kids watch the Tooth Fairy cross the map and wake up to a record of the moment.

Product design · SwiftUI · MapKit

Tooth Fairy Radar product screenshot 1
Tooth Fairy Radar product screenshot 2
Tooth Fairy Radar product screenshot 3
Experiments05 · Concluded — the lessons shipped elsewhere
05Experiment · Web · Concluded

Undercut

Undercut started with an unreasonable question: could one site answer almost anything about Formula 1? It explored race data, generated plots, and turned answers into social-ready graphics.

It never found the audience I hoped it would. It did become a serious education in LLM tool use, grounded analysis, generative interfaces, and where these systems break down.

LLM product design · Data tools · Generative interfaces

Undercut answering a Formula 1 question in plain English, with a grounded summary, supporting insights, and the results table it was computed from
A QUESTION IN. A GROUNDED ANSWER OUT.
An Undercut chart export showing constructor one-two finishes, each bar in its team colour
THEN A CHART THAT CAN’T LIE.
In the lab06—09 · In development

The day job

The work
behind the work.

At work, those questions run at a different scale.

The organization spans government, military, FFRDC, and engineering partners, with work across generative AI, computer vision, predictive analytics, automation, and mission software.

The goal isn’t simply to build prototypes. We’ve developed more than 50 user-driven capabilities and transitioned roughly 10 into enduring program software, while building enterprise AI patterns that connect mission applications, tools, and hundreds of underlying data sources.

A big part of my job is closing the gap between technology and the people who actually need it. That includes embedding technologists with operational organizations for months at a time, shaping major acquisitions, and helping senior government leaders understand which models, architectures, and investments are ready to matter.

At that scale, putting a chatbot in front of the data is the easy part. The actual system has to find the right information, use the right tools, understand context, respect security boundaries, and produce answers people can trust.

  • Team building
  • Technical direction
  • AI architecture
  • Model evaluation
  • Prototype to production
  • Developer enablement

The projects on this site give me firsthand evidence to carry back into that work: where agents lose context, where generative interfaces misstate data, which controls belong in code, and what useful developer tooling feels like. So when I sit with engineers, technology companies, or government leaders, the discussion starts from systems I use, test, and break — not a slide deck.

How I build

Across these projects, I use models for choices that benefit from variation — selecting an analysis, drafting a script, shaping a caption — and keep arithmetic, validation, policy, and rendering in tested code. The line moves by project; knowing where it is does not.

And when something breaks — a promo that leaked the answer, a chart that didn’t match its title, a lesson that shouldn’t have shipped — the fix becomes a rule the next build starts from.

This site is where I keep exploring.

ABOUT / TOM HUMPLIK

Different
domains.
Same discipline.

Tom Humplik, smiling and holding a microphone, in an on-stage conversation

Before AI, I spent more than a decade on molecules, batteries, and wargames. Water moving through a pore barely wider than a water molecule. Ions moving through a battery electrode nobody can watch directly. Then supplies, aircraft, and people moving across a contested map.

The domains change. The job underneath them doesn’t: take something complicated, work out what actually matters, build a representation of it, and find out where that representation breaks. Today I can test those representations in working software much sooner; the discipline is the same.

The long version
NOWDirector, AI/ML rapid prototyping

National Reconnaissance Office · AI/ML capabilities for large-scale intelligence analysis

BEFOREResearch Data Scientist

CNA · Sandia National Laboratories

FOUNDATIONPhD, Mechanical Engineering

MIT