Portrait of Serge Kotlyarov

Sydney, Australia

Serge Kotlyarov

Grumpy CTO

I have spent my career building software, technology teams and companies. I am most useful when an ambitious idea needs clear judgement and a practical route to a working product.

My interests sit where engineering, science and business meet.

Pro-bono

Consulting

Humanity has lived through four industrial revolutions, driven by steam, electricity, semiconductors and the internet. AI is the fifth: neither the end of humanity nor a bubble. Drawing on my experience, I understand AI well and can help with:

  • Prompting precision and clarity of intent
  • Evaluation of results and quality judgement
  • Multi-agent decomposition and delegation
  • Failure pattern recognition
  • Security design and compliance
  • Context architecture
  • Cost and token economics
  • MCP servers; private, locally hosted LLMs

If you are building a business with AI and any of the above is not your focus or consideration, you may want to invite me for a coffee.

Selected work

Projects

A few ideas I am exploring.

Notes and essays

Blog & publications

I write about AI, engineering, science, startups and politics. I plan to write more about the last one.

Grumpy CTOEssays and working notes

A publications list will be added here.

Contact

Send me a message

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I usually reply within 24 hours, although it may take longer when I am away. I do not respond to marketing messages.