Vic Shihang Li

I'm Vic, a fourth-year CS PhD at UW, advised by Simon Peter and Tom Anderson. I'm a member of SyFI Lab and a student lead of the Self-Defining Systems initiative.

I design agentic systems that build computer systems end to end, from design to operations. VibeSys is our system for realizing this vision.

I came to research with a passion for crafting really efficient systems, hacking on low-level Rust systems and operating systems. But in the age of agent software factories, efficient code has become cheap. That shifts the bottleneck to reasoning about correctness and rethinking maintainability, now more daunting than ever as code volume skyrockets.

I tackle these by designing abstractions for agents: frameworks to write in, tools to use, and guardrails to bound them. In doing so, I draw on my research across the stack, from distributed computing frameworks to programmable hardware.