Jesse Vincent (born June 21, 1976) is a computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for his work with the Perl programming language. He created the ticket-tracking system Request Tracker ("RT") and founded the company Best Practical Solutions.
He created RT while working at Wesleyan University in 1994. Graduating from the university in 1998, [1] Vincent founded Best Practical in 2001. [2] He co-authored RT Essentials in 2005. [3]
He is the founder and former project lead of K-9 Mail email app for Android (since acquired by Mozilla and rebranded as Thunderbird for Android). [4]
In 2012 he became interested in the ergonomics of keyboards, having designed and built himself several designs. [5] In 2014 he co-founded Keyboardio.
In 2021, he co-founded VaccinateCA, a community-run website for helping Americans find COVID vaccines.
In the mid-2020s, Vincent expanded his focus to include artificial intelligence and AI-assisted software development. In 2025, he published a series of posts on his blog describing a multi-agent workflow for software development with coding assistants (notably Anthropic’s Claude Code). He outlined an "Architect/Implementer" pattern for running parallel agents and released accompanying reusable “SKILL.md” prompts.^[Vincent, Jesse (5 October 2025). "How I'm using coding agents in September, 2025". Massively Parallel Procrastination.; Vincent, Jesse (9 October 2025). "Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025". Massively Parallel Procrastination.; Vincent, Jesse (16 October 2025). "Skills for Claude!". Massively Parallel Procrastination.] The work drew attention from software-engineering commentators, including coverage and summary by technologist Simon Willison.^[Willison, Simon (5 October 2025). "Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle". Simon Willison’s Weblog.]
From 2005 to 2008 he served as the project manager for Perl 6. He was the keeper of the pumpkin [6] for Perl versions 5.12 and 5.14. He changed the release cycle for Perl 5 from an irregular release done at the leisure of the project manager to a regular timeboxed release with development releases monthly and stable releases annually. [7]