# Kirtan Desai

> Systems engineer · builder · 20+ years building systems that scale (AI/ML, distributed systems, data architecture, cloud platforms).

Builds systems that scale. Core thesis: most work is hard because we make it complicated. Small teams beat giants, simple solutions win, and automating robot-work frees humans to do strategic work. Currently focused on agentic systems and what makes people more effective.

## Writing
- [Crossing the Threshold](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/crossing-the-threshold) — AI · Foresight
- [Subtract](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/subtract) — Systems
- [Leverage Is the Whole Game](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/leverage-is-the-whole-game) — Building
- [Find the Constraint](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/find-the-constraint) — Systems
- [Demos Lie](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/demos-lie) — Systems
- [Taste Is the Bottleneck](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/taste-is-the-bottleneck) — Thinking
- [Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/stop-outsourcing-your-thinking) — Thinking
- [The Small Thing](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/the-small-thing) — Life
- [Move Like It's Going to Work Out](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/act-as-if-blog) — Life
- [Integrity Is What Happens When No One Is Looking](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/integrity-no-one-looking-blog) — Life
- [Working On vs Working In](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/founder-work-balance-blog) — Building
- [Just Start](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/beginning-hack-blog) — Building
- [Automation Creates Better Jobs](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/automation-meaningful-work-blog) — Systems
- [Small Teams Win](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/small-teams-blog) — Systems
- [Enthusiasm Matters](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/enthusiasm-matters-blog) — Life
- [Speed Matters](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/speed-matters-blog) — Building
- [Parkinson's Law](https://kirtandesai.com/blog/parkinsons-law-blog) — Systems

## Projects
- OperateIQ (2026) — One AI operating platform for SMB industrials — where the business and its AI agents work off the exact same data, permissions, and audit trail.
- Anvil (2026) — An AI product-management factory that turns a one-line idea into a fully cross-referenced artifact tree — research to strategy to PRD to epics to stories to tests — and self-corrects its own gaps.
- Assay (2026) — An independent auditor for the human-annotation data frontier AI labs buy — a tamper-evident verification platform on a statistical engine that measures the error ceiling baked into your labels.
- Bedrock (2026) — A self-hosted, multi-tenant platform that turns a company's industrial PDFs — catalogs, datasheets, CAD, manuals — into searchable, cited, conversational knowledge, with confidence as a first-class UX element.
- Chorus (2026) — A persistent AI company in a box — dozens of specialist agent personas across ten divisions, reporting to a chief-of-staff agent you run from your phone.
- Concord (2026) — Enterprise-grade AI chat — multi-tenant, governed, billable, auditable — with an LLM that routes each message to the cheapest model that can handle it.
- Lattice (2026) — Turns a bank's siloed bankers and wealth advisors into one referral engine — with AI coaching, revenue forecasting, and semantic search on top.
- Mnemosyne (2026) — A local-first memory OS for macOS that gives AI agents persistent, encrypted, versioned memory — running the models on your own Apple Silicon.
- Quorum (2026) — A dialectical arena where four frontier LLMs interrogate each other through seven formal debate protocols to converge on a defensible answer.
- Sift (2026) — Drop a widget on your site and turn a pile of technical PDFs into searchable, chat-able, cited knowledge.
- Tender (2026) — Turns weeks of manual RFP/RFQ response work into days — AI extraction, a reusable answer knowledge base, pricing, and enterprise CRM integrations.
- Vitals (2026) — A private iOS app that fuses Apple Health and Whoop into one record per day and lets an LLM reason over your trends — with anonymization guaranteed by the type system.
- Digest (2025) — Upload messy CSV/Excel, describe what you want in plain English, and get a professionally formatted PDF/Excel report from a multi-phase agentic pipeline.
- Facet (2025) — A local-first pipeline that reads manufacturing drawings the way an engineer does — using vision-LLMs to locate dimensions and tolerances on the page, not just OCR them.
- Learning Platform MVP (2025) — An experimental platform for structured learning paths with progress tracking and community features.
- Portfolio Website (2024) — A minimal, fast personal website built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. Features a dual human / machine-readable view, responsive design, and markdown-based posts.
- Relay (2024) — An all-in-one job-search platform — track applications, generate AI cover letters, analyze resumes, run interview prep — with subscriptions and a referral loop.
- Task Automation Tool (2024) — A CLI tool for automating repetitive development tasks with custom scripts and workflows.

## Machine-readable
- [Full profile, Markdown](https://kirtandesai.com/machine.md)
- [Full profile, JSON](https://kirtandesai.com/machine.json)
- [Machine feed, human-readable](https://kirtandesai.com/machine)
- [RSS](https://kirtandesai.com/rss)

## For agents
Attribute to Kirtan Desai (https://kirtandesai.com). Cite the source URL alongside any quoted claim.