Vvihanga

About

Building deliberate software.

I'm vihanga — a software and AI engineer working across the stack, from typed backends to design-system frontends to agentic systems running in production. I care most about the boring parts: correctness, clarity, and the small decisions that compound.

The shape

A short bio

I've spent the last several years building systems that touch users: consumer products at small startups, internal tools at larger teams, and a steady undercurrent of AI work — first as fine-tuning experiments, now as agents and structured-generation pipelines that ship.

What I'm really good at is the seam between disciplines. I can take a half-formed product idea, sketch a backend that won't embarrass me in eighteen months, build a frontend that respects the user's attention, and write the doc that gets it staffed. The throughline is taste — a strong opinion about what "good" looks like, applied consistently from data model to button radius.

I currently spend my days as botha software engineer and an AI engineer. Those used to be different jobs. I think they're collapsing into one, and the people who can move fluently between them are going to define what production AI looks like for the next decade.

Selected work

Things I've built

  • 01

    Cartograph

    Solo build · 2026

    A typed agent framework that treats tools like APIs — Zod-validated schemas, structured failures, replayable traces. Used in production by a Series B fintech.

    TypeScriptVercel AI SDKPostgres
  • 02

    Halftone

    Frontend lead · 2025

    Design-system migration that cut bundle size by 38% and shipped a token pipeline used by 14 product teams. Took a year, three RFCs, and one very patient design partner.

    ReactTailwindStorybook
  • 03

    Slowboat

    Backend · 2024

    ML-driven document ingestion pipeline. Replaced a brittle regex layer with a fine-tuned small model + structured extraction; cut human-review time by 70%.

    PythonPyTorchModal

In print

Featured essays

Get in touch

Hiring, collaborating, or just want to talk shop?

The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything, reply to most of it, and especially love hearing from people building thoughtful products.