Chris Collins

About

Staff engineer at Intuit building agentic tooling for software development, search and data veteran, maker of furniture, sculptures and exhibits, and card-carrying retro-computing nerd.

Chris Collins, smiling, in a blue T-shirt with sunglasses perched on his head, on a sunny hillside

Hi, I’m Chris Collins. By day I’m a Staff Engineer at Intuit, building agentic tooling for the software development lifecycle: AI code review, code assistance, and the plumbing that lets humans keep an eye on a growing crowd of coding agents. By night (and weekends, and, if I’m honest, a fair few of the hours in between) I’m usually building something else.

The day job, the long version

For about three decades my work has orbited the same handful of things: data, information retrieval and search, NLP, distributed systems, and content management. I like hard technical problems, and I like the people who solve them even more. Some of the most satisfying work I’ve done is growing teams and helping talented engineers become even more talented ones.

The short tour:

  • Stoke-on-Trent, England. Grew up there and did a computing degree at the University of Staffordshire, specialising in microprocessors and distributed systems.

  • Basel, Switzerland. Three years at Sandoz, building a Documentum-based document platform for pre-clinical reports, which went on to become Novartis’s platform after the merger.

  • Documentum, California. Documentum brought me to the US in 1996 to work on its core server. It was going to be for a while. I’m still here.

  • Search, data, and a lot of acronyms. Catalog search at Ariba (where I somehow became the company’s data-standards person and ended up in ECCMA and ISO working groups), petabyte-scale indexing at Kazeon, ad relevance at Turn, and chief architect at Scout Labs, a social-analytics platform chewing through billions of posts, through its acquisition by Lithium.

  • Intuit, the first time. Built a shared semantic-search platform for TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint and friends, grew the search team from one person (me) to eighteen, and picked up Intuit’s CEO Innovation Award along the way.

  • SAP, Facebook, SAP again. Search capacity and semantic discovery at SAP Ariba, ads data pipelines at Facebook, conversational AI at SAP Labs, then Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for data and search at SAP SuccessFactors.

  • Intuit, the sequel. Rebuilt the gateway that streams QuickBooks events to third-party apps, and now I’m deep in agentic developer tooling.

The details are in my résumé.

Crazy agentic coding

I build a lot of software with AI agents, from enterprise systems to IoT gadgets to things that run on a 1985 Amiga. The evidence lives on my GitHub, and some highlights are on the projects page: an MCP server that lets AI agents drive a real Amiga, a 3DO game toolchain, code-graph search, and more. This site is a fair example too: it’s managed by an app I built with agents, and the tools section grew to well over a hundred browser tools that way.

Making things

I’m a constant learner, and "maker" is the closest thing I have to a single hobby. Lately that means:

  • 3D modelling, by hand in Fusion 360 and with AI tools like Meshy, then printing or machining the results.

  • Electronics, from IoT sensors to the guts of interactive sculptures.

  • Woodworking, especially furniture. Metalwork when wood isn’t stubborn enough.

  • Exhibits for retro-computing events, which is where all of the above collide.

Retro computing

I’m happily entangled in the retro scene: Amiga first and foremost, with Atari and Sinclair close behind. I was one of the main organisers and hardware builders for the Amiga 30th and Amiga 40th anniversary events at the Computer History Museum, and I give talks on agentic development with the Commodore Amiga: modern AI tools, meet 7 MHz.

Everything else

These days I live in Belmont, California. When I’m not at a keyboard or a workbench, you’ll find me behind a camera, travelling, eating something interesting, fixing things (including, occasionally, things that worked fine before I started), or hanging out with my geeky friends, who are the best kind.

Elsewhere

If the tools or write-ups here have been useful, you can buy me a coffee ☕ — it keeps the agents (and me) caffeinated.