Shawn Mervin

The lab

What I do outside client work to stay sharp. Right now that mostly means AI agents, tested somewhere I can't argue with the result.

Entries stay up whether they go well or not.

AWS Agentic Cup

2026 · Alpha Season · League A · in progress

A football league where you don't play the matches. You train five AI agents to be a team, coach them in plain English, and then they play on their own. Each league keeps a season table, and six league winners plus four wildcards go on to the finals in Las Vegas.

My club, Copper Zebra, is entered in League A of the Alpha Season, with its first matches in the week of 2 October 2026. No results yet. When there are some, they go here, whichever way they go.

Why it's on this site: it's my day job with a scoreboard. An agent is only as good as the instructions and limits you give it, and you find out whether you got those right once it's on its own and you can't step in. In production I let agents do the work that suits them and keep anything that matters checkable (more on that). The Cup tests the same thing, and the league table doesn't care how good the plan sounded.

agenticfootballcup.ai

  • multi-agent teams
  • plain-English coaching
  • AWS