Skip to main content
AI · Software Engineering · USC

Kyle
Macasilli-Tan

CS + AI student at USC (BS/MS, Presidential Scholar) who builds AI products that ship and get used. Strongest in Python and PyTorch across LLMs, RAG, and agent tooling — and comfortable across the full stack. Seeking Summer 2027 software-engineering and ML internships.

INITIALIZING
Selected Work

Things I've built

A selection of projects I've built, spanning AI agents, machine learning, and full-stack apps.

AIFeaturedIn Progress

Transformer From Scratch

A GPT-style language model built by hand in PyTorch — attention and all.

A small GPT-style transformer implemented from scratch in PyTorch — multi-head self-attention, the causal mask, the training loop, and text generation all hand-written rather than pulled from a library. Progresses from a char-level model on Shakespeare to a BPE tokenizer on a real corpus, with modern upgrades (RoPE, weight tying, RMSNorm) evaluated through measured ablations.

PythonPyTorchTransformersBPE Tokenization
AIFeaturedLive

Docs Navigator

Ask a question about a library's docs — get a source-cited answer.

A multi-library RAG documentation assistant (Next.js, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack) that answers natural-language questions with grounded, source-cited answers. BGE-M3 hybrid retrieval over Qdrant, cross-encoder reranking, and Claude for generation — FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, Dockerized on Render. Built a 70-question benchmark and evaluation harness (recall@k, MRR, faithfulness, out-of-scope refusal) and used controlled ablations to select the pipeline, improving section-level recall@3 from 58% to 73%.

70-question eval harness
PythonFastAPIBGE-M3QdrantClaudeDockerNext.js
AIFeaturedLive

SempAI

An AI agent that plans your week of meals and orders the groceries.

Turns your dietary preferences and spare ingredients into a full weekly meal plan, then auto-populates a Kroger cart for delivery — orchestrating Claude, recipe search, and grocery fulfillment end to end.

ReactTypeScriptViteZustandNode.jsExpressClaude APITavily APIKroger API
ML

Diabetic Retinopathy Classifier

A CNN that grades diabetic-retinopathy severity from retinal images.

A convolutional neural network with batch normalization and max pooling that classifies diabetic-retinopathy severity levels, built through USC's Center for AI in Society (CAIS++), a 30-member cohort selected from 300+ applicants.

73.77% accuracy
PythonPyTorch
WebLive

Spardle!

Real-time multiplayer Wordle with live head-to-head play.

A multiplayer take on Wordle — race an opponent in real time with live state sync and a clean competitive UI.

3,000+ users at peak
ReactNode.jsSocket.IO
Earlier work
WebEarlier work

JimboGames

A browser minigame hub with room-based multiplayer lobbies.

A multiplayer minigame platform built in high school. Players make an account, join a shared room, and pick from a collection of party games to play together in real time.

JavaScriptNode.jsSocket.IO
WebEarlier work

Aquarium Portfolio

A pixel-art fish tank where every fish is a project.

My sophomore-year highschool portfolio reimagined as an interactive aquarium: fish drift across the screen, your cursor becomes a net, and catching one reveals the project or internship it represents. Hand-built with original pixel-art animations.

JavaScriptHTML/CSSCanvas
About

CS + AI student at USC (BS/MS, Presidential Scholar) who builds AI products that ship and get used. Strongest in Python and PyTorch across LLMs, RAG, and agent tooling — and comfortable across the full stack. Seeking Summer 2027 software-engineering and ML internships.

USC · BS/MS Computer Science + AI
Presidential Scholar · Los Angeles, CA

Core stack

PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptC++JavaSQLHTML/CSSPyTorchTensorFlowMachine LearningDeep LearningLLMsRAGTransformersPrompt EngineeringVector DatabasesReinforcement LearningAI AgentsReactNext.jsNode.jsExpressFastAPIREST APIsDockerGitQdrantGoogle Cloud

Open to opportunities

Seeking Summer 2027 software-engineering and ML internships. Based in Los Angeles; open to remote or relocation.