Co-founder & CTO · Shovels
Luka Kacil
Our agents run our data pipelines, implement from specs, even run our hiring.
We are rebuilding what an engineering company is.
I write about agent-heavy engineering as it actually happens inside a live company. Receipts, not takes.
The Proof
That live company is Shovels. Government systems recorded everything that ever happened to the built world, but they never agreed on formats, names, or even what a project is. We resolve that mess into one intelligence layer: entities and signals that exist in no single source, and in most cases nowhere at all until we build them.
About
I build companies from the systems up, happiest where distributed systems, messy real-world data, and AI finally mesh into something new.
Before Shovels I spent a decade building data-intensive systems at scale. I was COO and CTO of AppMonsta, a fully remote, globally distributed team with Fortune 100 customers, until we were acquired in 2020.
The through-line is simple: making distributed things work. First the data systems, then a remote-first company years before that was normal. Now that agents write half the code, I care about engineering discipline more, not less.
Off the keyboard I lift, run, play tennis, and ski.
The Frontier
Generation got cheap before trust did. Agents produce faster than anyone can verify, so the frontier now is knowing what actually holds up. That is what I am pushing on.
That which I touch, I change.