Austen Tucker-Crowder
builder · AI enablement · program manager · agile coach
Chicago, IL
View résumé →Writer
I write fiction and essays about work, access, technology, and the strange ways people make a life.
Read something
Four good places to enter the work.
Artist
I make art with AI. I'm a low-vision, aphantasic artist, so I'm unmoored from the visual detail of reality. I get to build my own — one shaped by memory, feeling, and the 1990s cartoons that taught me how people move.
My imagination begins with emotional geometry: who belongs beside whom, what their shapes communicate, and how it feels when they share a world.
Professional work
I'm Austen — a builder and accessibility-first facilitator who helps teams make AI transformation practical through working tools, clear goals, and room to learn by building. My most recent completed professional chapter was AI Enablement and Transformation at ActiveCampaign.
- Helped raise agentic-coding adoption from roughly 2% to 43% of merge requests; it was still climbing at departure.
- Led a March 2026 roadshow for product managers across three continents, introducing Cursor and agentic AI; attendees began producing prototypes afterward.
- Built Wavelength, an MCP-enabled operating artifact containing tasks, RAID-log items, and program state.
What I do
AI Enablement
Designing the systems, curricula, and cultural scaffolding that let organizations actually use AI — not just buy it.
Facilitation
Running workshops, Worksites, and decision-forcing sessions that actually produce artifacts, not just sticky notes.
Program Management
Cross-functional coordination across engineering, product, design, and exec leadership — keeping things moving and honest.
Building
Writing code, shipping tools, and making software that I or other people actually want to use.
Interests & obsessions
- AI agents & tooling
- board game design
- fiction writing
- facilitation theory
- MCP servers
- constructivism
- accessibility
- Next.js
- Markdown publishing
- systems thinking
- Agile coaching
- Cursor IDE
- weird personal projects
- Chicago
- tabletop RPGs
About this site
The Arcades' Lab is my personal corner of the internet. It's built with Next.js 16, repository-owned Markdown, and Vercel — and it doubles as a sandbox where I try things out.
The name is about arcades in the older, weirder sense — wonder, novelty, and the cabinets crammed into the back of the room. Mine are the strange imports the owner brought in for himself: the side projects, the experiments, the games nobody asked for.
Bibliography
A few highlights from twenty years of writing under several names:
- The Painted Cat (2015, Argyll Productions / FurPlanet) — novel
- A Fuzzy Place (2013) — short story collection
- Bait and Switch (2010, Anthropomorphic Dreams) — novel
- 106 essays at The Bilerico Project (2009–2012) — LGBTQ politics, trans issues, gaming, identity
- Short fiction and poetry in Anthro magazine (2006–2007) — as Slyford T. Rabbit