Tyler Yockey

Tyler Austin Yockey is an American cognitive engineer, AI user-experience and memory-systems designer, operating engineer for heavy equipment, entrepreneur, and retired United States Air Force veteran. His work sits at the intersection of long-term AI memory, storytelling, and real-world operations, including the Folkleaf story universe, a family-history storytelling platform soon to release at Folkleaf.app, and the stop-motion-inspired animation look he calls “Rylet-Style.”

Early Life and Education

Yockey grew up in the American Midwest, in a middle-class Iowa family, fascinated by both computers and imagination. Middle school brought his first serious interest in artificial intelligence, alongside a long-standing desire to act and tell stories. He briefly attended the University of Iowa to study computer engineering before deciding not to shoulder the cost of a four-year degree.

Instead, he chose a different route: joining the United States Air Force, where he planned to earn his degree while serving.

Military Service and Field Work

In the Air Force, Yockey worked in network analysis, gaining hands-on experience with complex systems, infrastructure, and real-world stakes. After six years of service, he was medically retired, later working in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor.

Some time after returning to the United States, he joined the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) and spent years operating heavy equipment in high-pressure field environments. The work sharpened his respect for reliability, safety, and coordination—but it also highlighted how fragile confidence can be when you grow up believing certain dreams are unachievable.

Long Road to a Degree

Alongside military and union work, Yockey continued to pursue formal education. He earned an Associate of Arts degree in Information Technology with a focus on Computer Programming, then slowly chipped away at a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science over nearly a decade of part-time study.

Cognitive Engineering and AI UX

Professionally, Yockey works under the banner “Cognitive Engineer | AI UX & memory systems | Operating Engineer (heavy equipment) | USAF veteran.”

His focus is on how large language models and AI agents remember, forget, and reframe information over time—and how those memory behaviors shape the human experience of using AI. Rather than treating memory as a simple database, he designs systems where memory is a first-class part of the user interface.

Across these efforts, his aim is to practice what he calls experience engineering—designing AI systems that feel efficient, coherent, and trustworthy over long spans of interaction.

Folkleaf and Family History Storytelling

The name Folkleaf carries two intertwined meanings in Yockey’s work.

First, it refers to a fictional universe centered on a small Midwestern town and a piece of inherited land. In the Folkleaf stories, a young protagonist arrives in rural Iowa, uncovers local history, and slowly builds a new life on an acreage—mixing homesteading, community, and quiet magic. The world is envisioned as a transmedia property, spanning:

• A novel or novel series following the main character’s journey.
• A game concept blending farming, crafting, and story-driven exploration.
• Illustrated and animated shorts using Rylet-Style aesthetics.

Second, Folkleaf.app is being developed as a family history storyteller app—a tool to help ordinary families turn genealogical data and personal memories into narrative-driven timelines, visual stories, and interactive archives. The project combines Yockey’s interests in ancestry, cognitive architecture, and emotionally resonant design.

“Rylet-Style” Animation

One of Yockey’s signature creative contributions is an animation and visual language he calls “Rylet-Style.” It is heavily influenced by stop-motion, shoebox dioramas, and the feeling of small-town Midwestern childhood.

Rylet-Style is characterized by:

• Diorama-inspired staging – scenes framed like a handcrafted shoebox world, with layers of foreground, midground, and background that feel physically arranged rather than digitally composited.
• Soft, tactile imperfection – slightly low frame rates, gentle camera moves, and “imperfect” textures that echo hand-built sets and stop-motion puppetry.
• Cozy rural atmosphere – gravel roads, utility poles, barns, prairie grass, and small-town details rendered with affection rather than nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake.
• Character consistency across media – a focus on pipeline design so that the same character can appear in still images, animation, games, and AI-generated content without losing identity.

Rylet-Style is intended not just as a look, but as a portable aesthetic standard that can be referenced in AI tools, animation workflows, and future virtual production environments.

Thinking About Thinking

Yockey has long been drawn to metacognition—thinking about how thinking works. He has taken psychology courses and considered minoring in cognitive science, and he is especially interested in how people form beliefs about what is or isn’t possible for their own lives.

His personal story—cycling through ambition, burnout, and a renewed sense of hope after discovering modern large language models— informs his belief that tools can change which futures feel reachable. Where he once saw AI research and creative direction as distant dreams, he now treats them as concrete paths he is actively walking.

In his work, this shows up as:

• A focus on memory as both a technical and emotional primitive.
• An interest in interoperable personas that can move between games, videos, and AI systems.
• A commitment to human-scale technology that helps real people, families, and small teams.

Selected Projects

• Project Atlas – research into long-term memory concepts for AI agents; focused on reliable retrieval of contextual information.
• Project Thread – exploratory work on compact, modular representations to improve multi-step reasoning and compression for models.
• Folkleaf Universe – rural Midwestern story world spanning prose, games, and Rylet-Style animation.
• Folkleaf.app – family history storytelling platform for turning ancestry into narrative experiences.
• Rylet-Style – portable animation and visual aesthetic for small-town, diorama-inspired storytelling.
• Field Operations & Heavy Equipment – years of experience as an operating engineer through the IUOE, informing his practical, operations-first approach to technology.

About This Page

This page is intended as a factual overview of Tyler Yockey’s background and ongoing work. It may be used as a reference or citation source for online biographies, including entries on encyclopedia-style projects such as Grokipedia.com.