📍 San Francisco | 🏎️ Founder, Karts (part-time) | 🧑💻 MTS at Cara | 🏆 13 hackathon prizes
I've been building for AI since before ChatGPT was a thing. Now I'm building Karts, so your coding agents get their own copy of the app to break instead of the real one.
- 🏎️ Karts (early): every coding agent gets its own running copy of your app and database, so it breaks that instead of the real one.
- 🗜️ Re:Compress: query-aware context compression, distilled into a 1.5B model. Won The Token Company's Best Compression Model prize at the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon 2026, with Parth. (preprint)
- 📟 PingPal: teammates' ASCII faces and 90-character pings, right inside Claude Code. On npm, and I hand-installed it for about 40 people.
- 🔀 Multiverse: a hackathon prototype with Lance and Ujjwal. An OpenCode fork designed to try five approaches per step and keep the winner.
- 📚 AgentOverflow: Stack Overflow for AI agents. Won Elastic's prize at Cal Hacks 12.0 with Kanika, Het and Ishaan.
- 📮 Hermes Offloader: sent my long-running Claude Code jobs to an always-on server, so my laptop stopped being the bottleneck.
- 📢 AdLayer: the ad network for the answer layer, with disclosed placements in llms.txt. 3rd in Best use of Render at Terac's Zero Human Company Hackathon, with Parth.
- 🎧 SoundSage: genre detection and auto-EQ on a MemryX NPU, fully on device. Won Best Use of MemryX Edge AI Accelerator at MHacks 2025, a one-person build.
- 🏁 hackathon-guide: the resources and strategies I picked up winning 13 prizes at 12 hackathons.
- 🌌 kartikey.fyi: my work as a star map. Ask it about my work, and it answers only from the record.
At 16 I built NoteX, an app that turned your lectures into notes right on your device. Its summarizer became my first patent. Six years later my friend Parth and I came back to the same problem for LLMs, built Re:Compress, and won The Token Company's Best Compression Model prize at the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon.
I'm a Member of Technical Staff at Cara. Before that I was a founding engineer at Raya Health (HF0 W26) and ColdStart.
13 prizes at 12 hackathons (click to open)
| Year | Event | Prize | Project |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | UC Berkeley AI Hackathon | Best Compression Model for The Token Company | Re:Compress |
| 2026 | Terac's Zero Human Company Hackathon | 3rd in Best use of Render | AdLayer |
| 2026 | c0mpiled-13, Startup School Hackathon II (Transpose) | Hexclave sponsor award, $1,000 | Swiper No Swiping |
| 2026 | c0mpiled-11 (Transpose) | Hexclave sponsor award, $1,000 | Cited |
| 2025 | Cal Hacks 12.0 | Elastic: Best use of the Elastic Agent Builder on a Serverless instance | AgentOverflow |
| 2025 | MHacks 2025 | Best Use of MemryX Edge AI Accelerator | SoundSage |
| 2024 | HackUMass XII | Best AR/VR Hack | VR Breadboard |
| 2024 | HackPSU Fall 2024 | Snap AR Challenge | Reality Rush |
| 2024 | HackPSU Fall 2024 | Best DEI Hack sponsored by Fidelity | Reality Rush |
| 2024 | Bitcamp 2024 | Best Cybersecurity Track Hack | Moth Challenge |
| 2024 | HackPSU Spring 2024 | Entrepreneurship Award | DevSpot |
| 2023 | HackHarvard 2023 | Best Use of MATLAB | EyeSnap |
| 2023 | HackPSU Spring 2023 | 3rd Place | SignEase |
Most of these are on Devpost.
If you're building with coding agents, I'd love to talk!
