Augustin Chan
Augustin Chan is the CTO and founder of Digital Rain Technologies. His work sits at the intersection of AI and culture, grounded in an enterprise architecture background. He also builds surgical software — small, high-leverage tools built to solve exactly one problem well.
Previously, Augustin served as Development Architect at Informatica, leading enterprise architecture for Fortune 500 customers across APAC, MENA, and Europe. Before that, he was a Senior Consultant at Dun & Bradstreet.
Augustin holds a B.S. in Cognitive Science with Specialization in Computation from UC San Diego.
Latest
Work on What Has Decayed
Hexagram 18 is a picture of worms bred in a vessel left standing too long. I came back to an autonomous content system I built and found exactly that: bugs that grew in the dark because no one was reading the logs. The talk I submitted to PyCon HK 2026 is the field report.Jun 2026
Essays
- Risk Isn't a Number. It's a Fingerprint. (2026)
- Why I'm Building Crawl (2026)
- Teaching Taste to an Agent (2026)
- The Junzi Hypothesis (2026)
- Memory Systems and the Graph That Wasn't (2025)
- LLM Reasoning Patterns and Failure Modes (2025)
Short posts
Research
- Symbolic Reasoning Frameworks Modulate LLM Risk Aversion in Multi-Agent Strategic Settings (arXiv:2606.07552)How symbolic reasoning prompts (I-Ching, Tarot) reshape competitive dynamics and risk aversion among LLM agents in a 7-player Warring States Diplomacy variant.Code & data (doi:10.5281/zenodo.20338937)
- Statistical Properties of the King Wen Sequence: An Anti-Habituation Structure That Does Not Improve Neural Network Training (arXiv:2604.09234)A negative-results study: the I-Ching King Wen sequence has statistically distinctive anti-habituation properties, but they destabilize rather than improve gradient-based training.Code & data (doi:10.5281/zenodo.14679537)
Building
- Crawlopen-sourceMigration intelligence — automated discovery, risk scoring, and planning for legacy system modernization
- ARA Evalopen-sourceOpen-source framework for decomposing autonomous AI risk into 7 dimensions. Used by practitioners and enterprises to evaluate whether agents can act without human approval.
- 8-Bit OracleThe I-Ching through the lens of retro computing and science fiction — tech-noir art and commentaries. Presented at Taipei Blockchain Week.
- Six LinesiOS app for learning the I-Ching as literature and philosophy — bilingual hexagram reference with classical commentary and public domain masterwork art
- QDayAnon Research Platform
- Plum Blossom Computer (GitHub)Cosmological computation terminal — I-Ching divination (梅花易數) fused with on-chain commitments and real-time astronomical data. Built at the EasyA x Consensus HK 2026 hackathon.
- seeded-iching-engine (GitHub)
Speaking
- AI in Business: Practitioner Panel — Snowball Asia, with Alexander Payne, moderated by Tanya Chou (2026)
- 5-minute group divination demo — AI Tinkerers HK (2025)
- AI Agent technology discussion — with fullvaluedan (2025)
- 8-Bit Oracle deep-dive — with Eddylive (2024)
Consulting
People App, Travelbox