How I actually use AI tools in engineering work
Not a productivity take. A look at where LLMs are genuinely useful in systems work, where they're not, and what that tells me about building better agent tooling.
#ai-tooling#engineering#agents
Ziyang Liu
刘子阳
Software engineer. Worked on VM migration, guest tooling, and kernel debugging at SmartX.
Now spending time on AI tooling and agent reliability — starting with Windows desktop automation.
education
UESTC
B.Eng. Software Engineering
2020 – 2024
stack
langPython · Go · C · Shell
virtQEMU/KVM · libvirt · Virtio
debuggdb · perf · strace
experience
- ▸VM migration: multi-threaded incremental migration, orchestration, and data transfer improvements.
- ▸Virtio injection: VMware→KVM auto-injection for MBR/UEFI guests; rollback handling for legacy kernels.
- ▸Cross-cluster live migration and post-migration validation in SMTX OS VM services.
- ▸QGA tooling: extended QEMU Guest Agent with syscall tracing and structured log export.
- ▸Kernel debugging: isolated virtio-serial/console bug (payload >4KB stalls poll); produced reproducer.
- ▸Resolved 100+ customer incidents; standardized SOP for a UOS kernel issue.
ByteDance (Feishu)
Systems Integration Development Intern
Jun 2022 – Sep 2022 · Chengdu
products
Lark Suite- ▸Go + Gin services for recruiting/HR integration and data sync with external OA systems.
- ▸MongoDB for sync metadata and retry states; added auth, rate limiting, pagination, and regression tests.
projects
Windows-MCP
Research fork of CursorTouch/Windows-MCP. The focus is reliability: an agent uses the MCP server, patches it, hot-reloads it, reruns the same workflow, and checks whether the real desktop behavior improved. Inspired by karpathy/autoresearch.
PythonMCPWindowsAgent Research
PawMemo
Terminal app for word learning. Stores cards and review state in SQLite with an FSRS-style scheduler. Uses an LLM for character-style teaching and explanation. Supports swappable companion packs.
TypeScriptSQLiteCLILLM
writing
all posts →What live VM migration actually looks like
Live migration sounds clean in the docs. The reality involves dirty page tracking, guest agent timeouts, and failures that only happen under load.
#virtualization#systems#kvm
Debugging a VM freeze: a case study in cross-layer failures
A VM went unresponsive. The hypervisor thought it was fine. The guest disagreed. Tracing the failure across three layers to find the actual cause.
#debugging#systems#incident#virtualization
contact
Available for backend, infrastructure, and AI tooling roles. Reach out by email or connect on LinkedIn.