Nilay Baranwal
  • WorkSection
  • WritingSection
  • LabSection
  • Open sourceSection
  • GallerySection
  • AboutSection
  • ResumeSection
  • ContactSection
  • Hive MindProject
  • Pre-trade dashboardProject
  • Social LineProject
  • PartymakerProject
  • Orvio.aiProject
  • Agentic property managementProject
  • AI agents now outwork humans at Anthropic. Junior engineers are feeling it first.Article
  • Anthropic replaced git. Here's why you probably shouldn't.Article
  • Recruiters can now interview your AI twin. Here's what it actually checks.Article
  • Everyone's building a Jev rival. The independent numbers tell a different story.Article
  • Jev vs OpenAI Decisions API: which decision model should your agent use?Article
  • Top 10 Jev use cases in agentic appsArticle
  • Jev vs Laya: decision modelsArticle
  • LLMs or Jev: where each one actually fitsArticle
  • Everyone's talking about Jev. Here's a closer look at what the data shows.Article
  • Live agent with an approval gateLab
  • AI engineer interview, beginner pathLab
  • Behavioural interview coachLab
  • Interview drill, experiencedLab
  • AI adoption plannerLab
  • Discovery call simulatorLab
  • Scope a vague problemLab
  • MCP analyzerLab
  • MCP inspectorLab
  • Tool gate playgroundLab
  • Prompt-injection spotterLab
  • RAG chunking visualizerLab
  • Eval benchLab
  • Agent trace debuggerLab
  • Prompt caching simulatorLab
  • Context window budgetLab
  • textagentOpen source
  • Help EngineerOpen source
  • Email nilaybaranwal@gmail.comContact
  • Connect your agent to my MCP serverLab
  • LinkedInContact
  • GitHubContact

Where I've deployed

Each of these ran somewhere real, with the people using it in the room.

Hive Mind

Barclays, 2021 to now

Barclays, Markets Pre-Trade (embedded with the trading desk)

Every desk that wanted an AI assistant was building its own bespoke integration into pre-trade tooling and market data, with its own credentials and no shared audit trail.

  • An internal MCP server giving agents governed access to pre-trade tools, market-data services and team knowledge through one service.
  • OAuth 2.1 with PKCE against corporate SSO. Short-lived per-user tokens travel end to end, so every tool call runs under the caller's own entitlements, with a full audit trail.
  • Tool annotations drive the harness: read-only tools run freely, state-changing calls stop at a human approval gate, and anything unannotated is denied.
  • Typed JSON Schema contracts, recoverable structured errors, response-size limits to protect the context window, OpenTelemetry per tool call, and an eval suite on tool selection and argument accuracy before each release.

MCP, OAuth 2.1, TypeScript, OpenTelemetry, Evals

Pre-trade dashboard

Barclays, 2021 to now

Barclays trading desk

Traders were making pre-trade decisions across scattered tools, and a market-data bottleneck slowed them mid-session.

  • Ran requirement sessions on the desk and shipped a React/GraphQL dashboard iteratively against live trader feedback.
  • Diagnosed the bottleneck users reported mid-session, rewrote the queries and added a Redis cache.
  • Owned it end to end in a regulated environment: market-data integration, release, monitoring and frontline support.

40% faster decisions, $2M a year in cost savings, API responses 60% faster.

React, GraphQL, Redis, Java Spring

Social Line

2026 to now

Marketing teams, inside their own AI agents

Social Line homepage

Brands miss the mentions that matter because they arrive as an unranked stream across seven platforms.

  • AI social listening across Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and TikTok, with scored mentions in one feed in under two minutes.
  • A triage pipeline: LLM sentiment, estimated reach, auto-categorisation into the customer's own categories and a reputation score, ranked by reach at risk.
  • An MCP server over OAuth 2.0 and scoped API keys, so customers' existing agents drive keywords, mentions and triage through the same service layer as the dashboard.
  • Ran the whole loop myself: onboarding calls, four-tier pricing, a no-signup demo, and outreach to the Government of Bihar on listening for flood relief.

Next.js, Node.js, Claude, MCP, OAuth 2.0

Partymaker

2025 to now

Prague nightclub doors, on event night

Partymaker homepage

Promoters running 500 to 3,000 capacity events juggle ticketing, guestlists, door staff and cost splitting across spreadsheets and chats.

  • Co-founded and built checkout, door check-in, guestlists and organiser expense settlement.
  • Worked the door on event nights: offline-tolerant QR scanning, real-time roster sync across scanners, live triage with door staff, then fed what broke straight back into the roadmap.
  • Automated payouts reconciling ticket revenue and shared costs across currencies, aligned to PSD2 surcharging and agent-vs-principal VAT.
  • An MCP server so organisers run guestlists, expenses, tasks and payouts by talking to an agent.

Live with Prague venues and labels including Ankali and Harmony Rec.

Next.js, Node.js, MongoDB, Stripe, MCP

Orvio.ai

2025 to 2026

Customers' GA4, Search Console and CRM

Orvio.ai homepage

Businesses couldn't tell whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews cited them, or whether it brought in pipeline.

  • Co-founded Orvio Labs s.r.o. and built the product from the Next.js MVP up.
  • Connected to each customer's GA4, Search Console and CRM to attribute AI citations back to pipeline instead of reporting a vanity score.
  • A source-graph engine measuring citation frequency by domain across a frozen prompt panel.
  • Led enterprise scoping on multi-market programmes and ran the GDPR groundwork for crawling: LIA, Art. 14 transparency, DPIA.

Next.js, GCP, LLMs, GDPR

Agentic property management

2026 to now

Short-term rentals, Prague pilot

Traditional property managers charge a large cut for messaging, reviews, cleaning dispatch and reporting that agents can do.

  • Agents handle guest messaging, review replies, issue triage, cleaning and maintenance dispatch, and owner reporting, aiming at about half a traditional manager's fee.
  • Event-driven on top of the Beds24 PMS: validated webhooks, tool calls against reservations, calendars, messaging and pricing, and a scheduler that respects the API credit budget.
  • Approval gates for refunds, price changes and disputes, with per-property memory of house rules, SOPs and guest history.

Agents, Beds24 API, Webhooks, TypeScript

How I build agents for real users

The rules behind Hive Mind, which I now bring to every MCP server I ship.

Read-only by default
Tools that only read run freely. Anything that changes state waits for a person to approve it. Anything unannotated is denied.
The caller's own permissions
No shared service credentials. Each tool call runs under the user's own short-lived token, and every call is audited.
Thin agent layer
The MCP server sits on the same service layer as the UI, so the agent and the dashboard can't drift apart.
Evals before release
A regression suite checks that the agent picks the right tool with the right arguments before anything ships.

How I build agents for real users

The rules behind Hive Mind, which I now bring to every MCP server I ship.

Read-only by default
Tools that only read run freely. Anything that changes state waits for a person to approve it. Anything unannotated is denied.
The caller's own permissions
No shared service credentials. Each tool call runs under the user's own short-lived token, and every call is audited.
Thin agent layer
The MCP server sits on the same service layer as the UI, so the agent and the dashboard can't drift apart.
Evals before release
A regression suite checks that the agent picks the right tool with the right arguments before anything ships.

Open source

Tools I'm building in the open, for people shipping agents.

  • textagent

    Alpha

    Build AI agents people text instead of apps they install. Write the agent once and it runs over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram and email.

    TypeScript, MITView on GitHub
  • Help Engineer

    In design

    Know what your AI changed, and what it didn't. Test evidence on every PR that the code follows your team's rules and existing behaviour still holds.

    MCP, GitHub checksNot public yet