A letter
My week has two halves. Weekdays belong to Finrep, where I build AI for financial reporting. Weekends belong to whatever I’m building for myself.
I build for one moment: the look on someone’s face when the thing they were stuck on finally works. A video team was losing an hour of research on every clip; what I built for them does it in fifteen minutes. I was paying ₹130 a month for storage I barely opened; my own vault costs ₹25. Someone is annoyed by something they do every week, a weekend or three goes by, and the annoyance stops.
Then I built something bigger for myself: a voice emotion detector, software that listens to how people speak rather than what they say. The founder of Ligam, a live-streaming startup, came across it and asked to buy it. It became Lightpack, and it now ships as the Auto Switch Machine in Ligam Studio.
What I care about most is that things hold up when real people depend on them. So I measure before I trust, and I build with AI under rules: one agent plans, another checks the plan against the real code, a third writes it, and a fresh one tries to break it. And they keep me in the loop the whole way: every plan, review and change comes back to me before it ships. Nothing is done until I’ve watched it work.
That habit keeps the numbers right at Finrep, in filings people put their names to. And it’s the whole point of Kissago, my weekend project now, where every claim in every story is checked against its sources before you hear it.
If something slows your team down every week, tell me about it. Fifteen minutes is usually enough to know whether I’m the right person. The hackathons, and the 700-person amBITion I ran as GDG tech lead, are on the résumé.
Founder & engineer
A living story layer over the map of India. Every place has a story. Explore them on the map from your couch, or let them play on their own as you travel past a fort, a dhaba or a border. Each story is researched and backed by cited sources. Live on the web, Android app in the works.
Next · Postgres · Voice AI
Solo build · Acquired
A real-time engine that listens to a live multi-person conversation and decides who should be on camera, every 512 ms, from how people speak: voice activity, pitch, energy, laughter, interruptions. 42 ms per participant on CPU, no GPU. Ligam acquired the IP; it now ships as the Auto Switch Machine in Ligam Studio.
Python · FastAPI · Audio ML
VisitFounder & engineer
A small tool that teaches you any product by actually using it. Guided runs, not docs. Live, in active use, and still being shaped.
Next · TS · GenAI
VisitSolo build
A personal knowledge base for everything I save: text, video, articles, photos. Search runs locally on transformers, so I can ask “where is the sunset” and the right images surface.
Next · Local AI
VisitSolo build
Replaced a ₹130/mo cloud storage bill with a personal vault on AWS. 100GB at ₹25/mo, expandable. Built while learning AWS the deep way.
AWS · S3 · Node
VisitBuilt at Biengeclip AI
Upload a script, get back which asset to drop where on the timeline and for how long. Took video-research time on the team from an hour down to fifteen minutes.
Next · Tooling
VisitSolo build
Book home services like cleaning, repairs, the small chores, the same way you book a Rapido. Worker comes to you, in minutes, not days. The backend story is on Medium in three parts.
Node · Postgres · React
VisitOpen source
A REST API with structured, detailed information on every ISRO mission and launch vehicle. Open-sourced so the space community can keep adding to it.
Node · Open data
Visit
Freelance work, hackathons and the rest sit on GitHub; the longer story is in the résumé.
If anything here lined up with what you’re building, whether it’s a role, a freelance contract, or just a conversation, the calendar’s the fastest path. Grab a slot that works for you. Freelance usually goes like this: you tell me the problem on the call, and if it’s something I can do well, you’ll have a proposal back in 24–48 hours. If I can’t do it well, I’ll say so. Happens rarely, but it happens.
With care,
Kartik Shukla
engineer · builder · perpetual student