About
I didn’t set out to become the person who helps people escape subscription hell. I got there by doing the arithmetic.
I came up through finance, pivoted into infrastructure and DevOps, and kept going until I was building production AI systems. Somewhere along the way I added up what I was paying every month to rent other people’s tools — and what I was still doing by hand on top of those bills — and decided to build the systems myself, on hardware I own.
That decision is the whole thesis of Real and Works: you should own your AI infrastructure, not rent it. Cloud AI is convenient right up until the invoice and the lock-in arrive. A self-hosted stack keeps your data and your IP in the building, turns a per-token meter into a power bill, and gives you the kind of control where you can fix a problem at the layer it actually lives in — not file a ticket and wait.
Today I run a three-node self-hosted AI platform: local LLM inference, a GPU media-and-voice node, and a containerized hosting estate — orchestrating autonomous agents that build and run real businesses. The work on this site is the proof: an autonomous publishing studio, a voice agent that screens my calls, a multi-site hosting estate, a messaging gateway into my own models. Each one shipped, runs in production, and is honest about what broke and what it cost. That last part matters to me — “real and works” means it actually works, and I’ll tell you where it didn’t.
I’m honest about the line, too: the agentic tooling I build with — Claude Code and cloud LLMs in the loop — is best-in-class and rented; the systems I build and run are self-hosted on hardware I own. Knowing which to buy and which to own is the judgment I’m selling.
I work selectively and I build deeply. If you’re hiring an engineer who can architect and run self-hosted AI and agent systems, or you want that capability built for your own business — let’s talk.
Get in touch
Two ways, depending on what you need:
- Book a call — the fastest way to talk through a role or a project: Book a discovery call.
- Connect — find me on LinkedIn.