Yicong Cao

Turn natural-language requests into working websites and applications.

• Led the evolution of the Nex Agent protocol from plain-text SSE and XML commands to native tool calls and WebSocket RPC, covering the agent, frontend consumers, unit tests and removal of the legacy protocol.
• Designed Prechat/Postchat routing and Plan, Todo and askUser collaboration, using structured outputs, deterministic gates and completion checks to make complex tasks more controllable.
• Evolved Subagents into an orchestrator built on planners, workers and a graph state machine, with layered gates, token budgets, pause/resume, reconnection, persistence and task visualization.
• Built context-window management with hot/warm-zone compression, dynamic budgets, tool-message pairing, usage visualization and automatic compression and retry after overflow.
• Established four layers of tool-execution reliability: frontend/backend timeouts, a serial shell queue, WebSocket circuit breaking and WebContainer health checks; addressed interrupted streams, concurrent writes and auto-repair races.
• Built end-to-end agent diagnostics and telemetry from scratch, connecting quality events, tracing, error analysis, monthly token reports and operational views for session-level diagnosis.

Match players, form teams and host dedicated game servers.

• Contributed to PGOS since 2021, covering competitor research, technology selection, project initiation, core development and launch.
• Developed core services for game sessions, matchmaking and persistent connections, supporting rule-based teams, competitive matchmaking and session allocation.
• Built configurable matchmaking with declarative rulesets and an expression engine to describe player attributes, team structures and multidimensional constraints, reducing repeated implementation across games.
• Designed for fairness, search efficiency and queue time, with rules that relax as players wait, multiple matching modes and concurrent rulesets.
• Helped build the matching platform with composite indexes, priority queues, ticket lifecycle management, a simulator and autoscaling for rule debugging and distributed execution.
• Built DS Hosting, a flexible, autoscaling server-fleet management system for dedicated game servers.
• Implemented Knative-based Virtual Server clusters so developers could extend PGOS through event-driven services.

Let users ask for game knowledge and access services through conversation.

• Built a chatbot with Rasa NLU for intent recognition and slot extraction, using the NLU approach of early Siri-style assistants to answer game-knowledge, meeting-room booking and weather queries.
• Built a containerized training platform to help improve classifier accuracy.
• Developed a Bot framework with support for third-party integrations.
• Open-sourced a text-adventure engine developed in my spare time: MarkdownGame。

Improve network connectivity and multiplayer experiences for PC games.

• Developed an LSP framework for local-proxy forwarding and custom protocols, supporting synchronous, asynchronous, event-based, overlapped, completion-routine and I/O completion-port networking models.
• Improved network routes and NAT types to resolve connectivity issues in P2P games.
• Developed a load-testing framework and worked with operations to stress-test backend network routes.
• Developed an HTTP acceleration framework, proposed SOCKS5 system-proxy and DNS interception approaches, and used the latter to accelerate Steam Community access.

Use Android applications directly on a PC desktop.

• Built a desktop client around an Android emulator to run mobile apps such as Tiantian Kuaibao, Kuaishou and Douyin directly on a PC desktop.
• Proposed and implemented interaction improvements, including a draggable back button and emulated hardware scroll-wheel input.
• Implemented analytics instrumentation and analyzed user data.

Scan and remove unwanted files, exploring automatic identification.

• Developed PC Manager cleanup tools, analytics instrumentation and user-data analysis.
• Combined Naive Bayes and TF-IDF to prototype path-based identification of unwanted files and wrote a patent application.

Bring a familiar Start menu back to Windows 10.

• Developed a classic Start menu that recreated Windows 7-style functionality on Windows 10.
• Developed a Win10 setup assistant to help users configure newly installed systems.

Bring content from multiple sites into one Windows application.

• Developed a UWP client and crawler API to aggregate more than ten sites, including Zhihu Daily, PingWest, Douban Yike and Jandan, into a card-based feed.
• Submitted the application to the Windows Store under the name Aikan Duanzi.
• Continually improved loading speed, responsive layouts and transitions for touch, mouse and keyboard, with bookmarking and export support.

A reading product for the web and Windows Phone.

• Designed the product and independently built the frontend and backend with Python and Django, deploying it on Google App Engine.
• Developed the Jianzhi Reader client for Windows Phone.

Connect fitness and gaming through Kinect motion recognition.

• Developed a Kinect client for an exercise bike, implementing motion recognition with the Kinect API.

Discover, filter and download web images in batches.

• Developed an image-downloading tool with four batch-download modes.
• Published on CRSKY and Duote, with resource discovery, batch page entry, multilevel URL analysis, page/image filtering, adaptive image sizing and search-engine support; reached over 10,000 downloads.