---
title: "About"
description: "CHSPE → community college → UC Irvine → data engineering → formal proofs via AI agents."
author: "Joey Lopez"
date: "2026-03-25"
tags: ["reference"]
atom_id: 25
source_html: "about.html"
url: "https://jrlopez.dev/p/about.html"
generated: true
---

[← jrlopez.dev ]()
# About I passed the CHSPE at 16, did two years at community college, and transferred to UC Irvine for informatics. After graduating I spent five years in financial services data engineering — building pipelines, ETL systems, and the kind of infrastructure that runs silently until it breaks at 2am. In 2025 I started experimenting with spec-driven AI workflows — giving language models structured specifications instead of open-ended prompts. The methodology worked well enough that I used it to produce a [formal proof ]()that regex-based AI safety filters have an algebraic blind spot. I didn't write the proof by hand. I wrote the specification, built the agent pipeline, and the system generated a result that survived peer review. That changed how I think about what these tools are for. Now I teach the methodology — how to treat prompts as programs, how to build dependency-ordered agent workflows, how to get reliable outputs from unreliable models. Everything on this site came from that same approach: research a problem, formalize the method, build the tooling, then teach it. The [Lattice-Driven Development ]()page explains the framework. The [resume ]()has the professional history. [Book 15 min ]()Joey Lopez · 2026 [.md ]()