Joao Wenzel
About Joao Wenzel
Joao Wenzel works at Citadel Securities, the market maker where more than two-thirds of employees write code. In an AI Engineer talk, he describes an agentic system that builds a dated, sourced model of the company from status decks, Slack threads, code changes and agent session traces, so agents can help with strategy rather than only code.
Notable Positions
On the Company as a State Estimator
Borrowing from robotics, every claim about a project carries a date and a source, its confidence decays as evidence ages, and new evidence collapses the uncertainty. The loop is update, age, observe, grade and correct, with agents proposing changes and code and people deciding what gets recorded. See Memory in AI.
On Watermelon Projects
Status decks reflect what people report. Combining them with Slack, PRs and agent traces exposes projects that are green on the slide and yellow in the evidence.
On Backtesting
Because records are never rewritten, the model can be snapshotted at a past date and graded against what happened. Green statuses the agent flagged were twice as likely to turn yellow or red.
Key Quotes
- "That person is a company's world model, essentially." (on the long-tenured employee who knows everything)
- "They're green on the outside and red on the inside." (on watermelon projects)
- "Don't assume that just like indexing everything and cataloging everything is enough" (on why RAG falls short)
Related Reading
- Memory in AI - Persistent context for agents
- Context Engineering - Getting the right context to agents