We build the hard parts

We design and build LLM systems that earn production: agents that finish work rather than demo it, retrieval and tool-use that return the right thing, and a cost model you can defend line by line. The parts the field is still arguing about — context management, token efficiency, model routing, evals — are the parts we take ownership of.

The model is rarely the difficult part. What is difficult is everything that has to stay true around it: a provider prompt cache that survives a proxy hop byte-for-byte, a tool surface an agent can actually drive without burning its context window on retries, an eval that fails for the reason you think it does, and a spend curve that doesn't quietly bend when traffic does. We treat those as engineering invariants with tests behind them, not as prompt tuning.

Token Efficiency Engine — a Rust gateway that meters LLM spend without breaking the provider's prompt cache. Provider caches key on a byte-exact, order-sensitive request, so we metered, attributed and routed every call while keeping the upstream payload byte-stable under concurrency. Spend metered, cache intact, model routing built in rather than bolted on.

Security as an engineering discipline, not a review gate bolted to the end of a release. We set the strategy — what actually threatens this business, in what order, and what it is worth spending on — then build the architecture and the code that make it true: least privilege by construction, blast radius bounded, and every access path leaving evidence behind it. We will also audit what someone else built and hand back a fix order rather than a severity list.

Two things quietly break most security programs. Controls that are conventions instead of constructions: privilege enforced in a runbook rather than in the type system, the database role, or the network boundary, which means it holds right up until someone is in a hurry. And reviews that cannot tell you what they failed to look at — a check that could not see its data has to say so, never report a pass, because on the page a vacuous pass and a clean one read exactly alike. We close both, and we write down the coverage as honestly as the findings.

Database Audit Engine — a read-only ClickHouse and Neo4j auditor built the way we build controls: 105 checks (62 ClickHouse, 43 Neo4j) behind a readonly=2 user and Neo4j's reader role, a parse-time statement allowlist, per-query time/row/memory caps, and query literals stripped at ingest so no raw query text or parameter value can reach a report. Findings collapse into causal chains, so twenty become three in fix order.