Four years ago, our CTO, Andy Sitison , introduced us to Scott Fryxell. Things haven’t been the same since.
Quick story time.
SMS’s technical journey began years earlier, when our CEO, James Warren, asked our development partner at the time, David Newberger, to mock up a web page that could analyze story text using IBM Watson’s Personality Insights and Natural Language Understanding models.
David went further and built the capability directly into our website. In those early days, James would select a story in the admin portal, click “run analysis,” and manually copy the resulting emotional scores into a spreadsheet. When David discovered that last part, he promptly turned the scores into an Excel download.
That progression captures something essential about how we’ve always built: start with a meaningful human question, make the technology useful, learn from how people actually use it, and keep improving.
Andy joined SMS in 2017, bringing significant AI and data science expertise that we did not have. He laid the technical foundation for what would become SEEQ — building new analytical tools, advancing our data products, and developing proprietary methods for processing and interpreting stories.
Then, in 2022, Andy brought Scott onto the team.
Scott has introduced a level of architectural elegance, engineering sophistication, and product usefulness that has elevated both what we build and how we build it.
His recent essay, “The Harness Is the Thing,” offers a glimpse into how he thinks and works. It explores the engineering systems Scott has built around AI-assisted development: how he combines models, tools, specialized roles, reusable skills, human judgment, and disciplined review to improve both the quality and efficiency of his work.
The essay is technical, written primarily for those interested in software engineering, AI-assisted development, and agentic workflows. But even if that isn’t your world, consider it another proof point for the caliber of the people building SEEQ, the intentionality behind how we’re building it, and why the values guiding the work make such a difference.
Years ago, SMS adopted a simple technology ethos: Human + Digital.
Scott embodies it.
Read Scott’s essay, “The Harness Is the Thing.”
