{
  "profile": {
    "name": "Kirtan Desai",
    "role": "Systems engineer · builder",
    "focus": [
      "AI/ML",
      "distributed systems",
      "data architecture",
      "cloud platforms"
    ],
    "experience_years": "20+ years",
    "languages": [
      "Python",
      "Go",
      "TypeScript"
    ],
    "links": {
      "x": "https://x.com/kirtandesai",
      "github": "https://github.com/kirtandesai",
      "site": "https://kirtandesai.com"
    }
  },
  "summary": "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": [
    {
      "title": "Crossing the Threshold",
      "date": "2026-07-02",
      "tags": [
        "AI · Foresight"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/crossing-the-threshold"
    },
    {
      "title": "Subtract",
      "date": "2026-06-16",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/subtract"
    },
    {
      "title": "Leverage Is the Whole Game",
      "date": "2026-06-14",
      "tags": [
        "Building"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/leverage-is-the-whole-game"
    },
    {
      "title": "Find the Constraint",
      "date": "2026-06-01",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/find-the-constraint"
    },
    {
      "title": "Demos Lie",
      "date": "2026-05-26",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/demos-lie"
    },
    {
      "title": "Taste Is the Bottleneck",
      "date": "2026-04-30",
      "tags": [
        "Thinking"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/taste-is-the-bottleneck"
    },
    {
      "title": "Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking",
      "date": "2026-03-30",
      "tags": [
        "Thinking"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/stop-outsourcing-your-thinking"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Small Thing",
      "date": "2025-09-12",
      "tags": [
        "Life"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/the-small-thing"
    },
    {
      "title": "Move Like It's Going to Work Out",
      "date": "2025-09-11",
      "tags": [
        "Life"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/act-as-if-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Integrity Is What Happens When No One Is Looking",
      "date": "2025-08-26",
      "tags": [
        "Life"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/integrity-no-one-looking-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Working On vs Working In",
      "date": "2025-08-24",
      "tags": [
        "Building"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/founder-work-balance-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Just Start",
      "date": "2025-08-06",
      "tags": [
        "Building"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/beginning-hack-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Automation Creates Better Jobs",
      "date": "2025-08-06",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/automation-meaningful-work-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Small Teams Win",
      "date": "2025-07-26",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/small-teams-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Enthusiasm Matters",
      "date": "2025-06-06",
      "tags": [
        "Life"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/enthusiasm-matters-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Speed Matters",
      "date": "2025-05-21",
      "tags": [
        "Building"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/speed-matters-blog"
    },
    {
      "title": "Parkinson's Law",
      "date": "2025-04-17",
      "tags": [
        "Systems"
      ],
      "url": "https://kirtandesai.com/blog/parkinsons-law-blog"
    }
  ],
  "projects": [
    {
      "name": "OperateIQ",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "private alpha",
      "description": "One AI operating platform for SMB industrials — where the business and its AI agents work off the exact same data, permissions, and audit trail.",
      "stack": [
        "TypeScript",
        "Next.js",
        "tRPC",
        "MCP",
        "Postgres",
        "Drizzle",
        "Claude",
        "Vercel",
        "Docker"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Anvil",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js",
        "React",
        "Python",
        "FastAPI",
        "Temporal.io",
        "Supabase",
        "pgvector",
        "Multi-model AI"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Assay",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Python",
        "FastAPI",
        "Temporal",
        "Postgres",
        "Cryptography",
        "NumPy",
        "Statistics"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Bedrock",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 14",
        "Supabase",
        "Postgres FTS",
        "Gemini",
        "RLS",
        "pdfjs"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Chorus",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "prototype",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Python",
        "LiteLLM",
        "asyncio",
        "Tauri (Rust)",
        "FastAPI",
        "Multi-channel"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Concord",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "production-ready",
      "description": "Enterprise-grade AI chat — multi-tenant, governed, billable, auditable — with an LLM that routes each message to the cheapest model that can handle it.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 16",
        "Vercel AI SDK",
        "Supabase",
        "Stripe",
        "Upstash Redis",
        "Multi-model AI",
        "Vitest"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Lattice",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "Turns a bank's siloed bankers and wealth advisors into one referral engine — with AI coaching, revenue forecasting, and semantic search on top.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 14",
        "Supabase",
        "Postgres RLS",
        "Claude",
        "pgvector",
        "Stripe",
        "Recharts"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Mnemosyne",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "A local-first memory OS for macOS that gives AI agents persistent, encrypted, versioned memory — running the models on your own Apple Silicon.",
      "stack": [
        "Swift 6",
        "MLX",
        "Metal",
        "SwiftUI",
        "SQLite/GRDB",
        "On-device LLMs",
        "LoRA"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Quorum",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "A dialectical arena where four frontier LLMs interrogate each other through seven formal debate protocols to converge on a defensible answer.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 16",
        "React 19",
        "Vercel AI SDK",
        "Supabase",
        "Claude",
        "GPT",
        "Gemini",
        "Grok"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Sift",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "mvp complete",
      "description": "Drop a widget on your site and turn a pile of technical PDFs into searchable, chat-able, cited knowledge.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 16",
        "Cloud Run worker",
        "Supabase",
        "pgvector",
        "Gemini",
        "RAG",
        "Docker"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Tender",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "Turns weeks of manual RFP/RFQ response work into days — AI extraction, a reusable answer knowledge base, pricing, and enterprise CRM integrations.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 16",
        "Supabase",
        "Multi-model AI",
        "Salesforce",
        "Oracle JDE",
        "OKLCH design system"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Vitals",
      "year": "2026",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Swift",
        "SwiftUI",
        "SwiftData",
        "Swift Charts",
        "HealthKit",
        "Claude",
        "XCTest"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Digest",
      "year": "2025",
      "status": "mvp complete",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 15",
        "React 19",
        "Convex",
        "Vercel AI SDK",
        "Multi-model AI",
        "jsPDF/xlsx",
        "Vitest"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Facet",
      "year": "2025",
      "status": "prototype",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Python",
        "Vision LLMs",
        "PyMuPDF",
        "Tesseract",
        "SQLite",
        "Apple Silicon"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Learning Platform MVP",
      "year": "2025",
      "status": "planning",
      "description": "An experimental platform for structured learning paths with progress tracking and community features.",
      "stack": [
        "React",
        "Node.js",
        "PostgreSQL",
        "Redis"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Portfolio Website",
      "year": "2024",
      "status": "live",
      "description": "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.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js",
        "TypeScript",
        "Tailwind CSS",
        "Markdown"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Relay",
      "year": "2024",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "An all-in-one job-search platform — track applications, generate AI cover letters, analyze resumes, run interview prep — with subscriptions and a referral loop.",
      "stack": [
        "Next.js 14",
        "Prisma",
        "Supabase",
        "Stripe",
        "Anthropic",
        "OpenAI",
        "Server Actions"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Task Automation Tool",
      "year": "2024",
      "status": "in development",
      "description": "A CLI tool for automating repetitive development tasks with custom scripts and workflows.",
      "stack": [
        "python",
        "go",
        "bash"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "for_agents": {
    "attribution": "Kirtan Desai — https://kirtandesai.com",
    "citation": "Cite the source URL alongside any quoted claim.",
    "generated": "2026-08-16"
  }
}