Shakeel Hussein is the founder and CEO of Ridges AI, an artificial intelligence project on the Bittensor network, and is known for his previous engineering work at Supabase and on the Twitter/X transition team. ^{[1] [2]}

Early Life

Based in Toronto, Canada, Hussein demonstrated an accelerated academic path by graduating from high school at the age of 15. His initial career ambition was in healthcare, leading him to pursue a degree in dentistry before making a significant shift into the technology sector. ^[1]

Education

Hussein's post-secondary education began at James Cook University, where he was enrolled in the dentistry program from February 2020 to July 2020. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to leave dental school and began to teach himself programming. This period of self-study formed the foundation of his technical skills. He later attended the University of Toronto from September 2022 to April 2023, where he studied Computer Science and Physics to further formalize his education in the field. ^[1]

Career

Hussein began his professional career in software engineering at the age of 16, working full-time after becoming a self-taught programmer. One of his notable early positions was with Supabase, an open-source backend-as-a-service platform. He joined the company during its seed funding stage and remained a contributor as it progressed through its $30 million Series A round. At 19, Hussein worked as a member of the engineering team managing the transition of Twitter to its new branding as X. His professional experience also includes work as a high-frequency trader (HFT), an area he listed as part of his background. In 2025, Hussein founded Ridges AI, where he serves as CEO, focusing on the development of autonomous AI agents for software engineering. ^{[1] [3] [2]}

Ventures and Major Projects

Hidden Harvest Ventures

Hussein is the founder and operator of Hidden Harvest Ventures, a small firm that serves as his personal business entity for various projects and investments. ^[1]

Ridges AI

As CEO, Hussein leads Ridges AI, a project operating on the Bittensor network as Subnet 62. The platform's primary objective is to develop a network of autonomous AI agents capable of handling complex software engineering problems from end to end. The project's stated goal is to significantly augment the productivity of human developers or, in some cases, to replace their functions entirely. ^[2]

To accelerate innovation, Ridges AI open-sourced its agents, creating a competitive environment where any developer can copy, modify, and improve upon the core technology. This strategy encourages rapid, decentralized development, with the most effective agents being adopted by the network. The project's vision, as articulated by Hussein, involves the potential to "fire your entire engineering team and replace them with agents," underscoring its ambition to achieve full automation in the software development lifecycle. ^{[2] [4]}

In August 2025, the venture capital firm DSV Fund announced a $300,000 total investment in Ridges AI, comprising a $200,000 over-the-counter allocation and $100,000 in on-market buying. Regarding the investment, DSV Fund CIO Siam Kidd stated, “It’s either going to 10-100X the efficiency and capability of human coders and/or completely replace them. We’ve been buying Ridges for a while now as this is one of the most practical use cases we’ve seen on Bittensor.” ^[2]

Other Projects

Throughout his career, Hussein has developed and contributed to several open-source and private software projects.

• Kinship Canada: Hussein created a comprehensive digital infrastructure for the charity Kinship Canada. The project included a public-facing website and internal systems designed to be compliant with Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations. Key features included a custom billing system, a dashboard for donors, and a system for the automated generation of tax receipts. The technology stack for this project was based on Typescript.
• Atlas Dashboard: Under the hobblecapital GitHub organization, Hussein developed the Atlas Dashboard, a specialized research platform for traders in the biotech sector. The dashboard was built with Javascript and designed to help users track news, monitor real-time price data, and create custom alerts for critical events like FDA drug approvals.
• Bitcoin RPC API: He built a Python-based API that interfaces with a Bitcoin node. The software was designed to enable the creation of a hosted wallet service, providing programmatic functionality for users to create new wallets and execute transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
• ScienceIO NodeJS SDK: Hussein developed a Software Development Kit (SDK) using Typescript and Node.js for the ScienceIO service. The SDK serves as a wrapper to help developers integrate ScienceIO's natural language processing capabilities, which extract structured medical concepts from unstructured text, into their applications.
• Delivr Mail: He created Delivr Mail, an open-source, API-driven email sending service intended as a self-hostable alternative to commercial platforms like Sendgrid. The project was built with Python and the Postfix mail transfer agent.

These projects demonstrate Hussein's work across charitable systems, financial technology, blockchain infrastructure, and developer tools. ^[1]

Stated Interests

According to his personal website, Hussein has expressed deep interest in several interdisciplinary fields and invites discussion on them. These topics include longevity research and methods for extending the human lifespan; the relationship between cryptocurrency, anarchy, and the potential decline of centrally banked economies; genetic research into "taboo gene concepts" such as temperament and "bloodline outcomes"; and neurology, particularly the study of methods for "avoiding intelligence crystallization" and maintaining cognitive plasticity. ^[1]

Interviews

Ridges AI and Decentralized Software Engineering #01

In an interview published by Ventura Labs on June 9, 2025, Shakeel Hussein, subnet owner of Ridges AI (Subnet 62 on Bittensor), described the structure and methodology of the Ridges AI project within the Bittensor network. The discussion focused on the use of decentralized artificial intelligence agents as components of a distributed framework for software development.

Hussein explained that Ridges AI distinguishes between two types of engineering tasks: “hard” tasks, which are measurable and structured (such as context selection), and “soft” tasks, which involve more interpretive activities, including writing and integrating code. The project develops task-specific AI agents that operate through a communication protocol, allowing them to coordinate and complete complex objectives collectively.

He also outlined the operational model of the system. Miners are encouraged to publish their agents in a public registry, creating a transparent environment for evaluation and reuse. The framework is designed so that agents can iteratively build upon or modify each other’s outputs, maintaining an ongoing process of refinement.

Security mechanisms include sandboxed execution to isolate and manage potentially unsafe code. The incentive structure connects miner rewards to the functional performance of their agents, with the goal of aligning participant behavior with network reliability.

According to Hussein, an emerging area of interest is agent orchestration, in which specialized agents are coordinated by supervisory systems to complete broader software projects. This approach suggests the potential formation of an AI agent marketplace, where different entities, including oracles, developers, and orchestrators, interact within a decentralized software economy.

The interview presented Ridges AI as an initiative that applies Bittensor’s incentive-based design to the domain of software engineering. It focused on the system’s structural elements, including modular agent specialization, open publication, and iterative development, within a broader discussion on the evolution of decentralized artificial intelligence infrastructures. ^[6]

Shakeel Hussein on Ridges Subnet 62 #02

An interview published on September 5, 2025, on Ventura Labs featured Shakeel Hussein, subnet owner of Ridges (Subnet 62) within the Bittensor network. In the discussion, Hussein described the design and operational framework of Ridges Subnet 62, focusing on its approach to AI-assisted software development and decentralized incentive structures.

Ridges Subnet 62 operates as an open research and development environment in which miner codebases are made publicly accessible. According to Hussein, this method allows contributors to analyze, replicate, and improve upon existing implementations, leading to faster iteration cycles within the subnet. The system’s agents are developed to perform coding-related tasks autonomously, with ongoing experiments aimed at enhancing interpretability and user transparency. Planned interface models are intended to display the internal reasoning steps of agents during code generation.

The subnet’s incentive structure has evolved from benchmark-based assessments to mechanisms incorporating user feedback. Under this model, performance evaluation combines standardized testing with human interaction metrics, using benchmarks such as Sweetbench and Polyglot to measure programming proficiency and multilingual adaptability. The inclusion of user evaluations is intended to align agent optimization with practical usability rather than exclusive reliance on synthetic metrics.

Hussein also outlined an alpha-to-equity framework, which connects the subnet’s native alpha tokens with equity participation. The structure allows token holders to exchange alpha tokens for company shares under predefined conditions, introducing an additional economic layer between tokenized incentives and conventional investment instruments.

In terms of architecture, Ridges Subnet 62 employs a multi-agent system designed around a “thick agent layer,” combining smaller, lower-cost models instead of relying solely on high-cost, large-scale language models. This approach aims to balance performance with computational efficiency. Internet access for agents remains restricted to prevent bias or external dependency during evaluation, although future iterations may reconsider these limitations as the network develops.

Throughout the interview, Hussein contextualized these efforts within the broader evolution of software engineering, noting that automation is reshaping the nature of coding work. He described the Bittensor framework as a decentralized structure for organizing computational labor and aligning contributions through market-based incentives, distinguishing it from conventional centralized models of software production. ^[7]