AI is powerful.
Humans still call the shots.
We engineer the systems between — practical AI you can trust and the high-performance code underneath. Real engineering, in production, for teams that still take responsibility for the call.
What we work on
Three things we go deep on — and we'll take any problem that needs real engineering.
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AI Cost Reducer
Booking nowYour LLM bills are out of control. We audit your inference path end-to-end, find the waste, and bring costs back to earth — usually 40 to 70 percent down without losing quality.
- Inference cost audit & instrumentation
- Routing, caching, and model-tier optimization
- Dashboards & guardrails that prevent the next blow-up
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AI Agent Automation
Booking nowProduction-grade agents, not demos. We design and ship agents that reliably take work off your team — with the right tool integration, human-in-the-loop, and observability built in from day one.
- Agent architecture & tool/protocol design
- Workflow integration (CRM, ERP, internal APIs)
- Reliability, evals, and human review loops
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Critical Core Systems
Booking nowThe systems your product cannot afford to fail. We design and build the high-performance, secure, reliable engines underneath — usually in Rust, always engineered to the level the problem deserves.
- High-performance services & hot-path rewrites
- Secure-by-design backends & infrastructure
- Reliability, observability, and operational hardening
How we work
Small lab, grown-up process.
- 01
Listen
A short call to understand the problem, the constraints, and what "done" actually looks like. We say no early if we are not the right fit.
- 02
Scope
A written proposal: deliverables, timeline, price, and the assumptions behind them. No surprises, no hourly meters running.
- 03
Ship
We build it, ship it, and stay involved long enough to measure that it actually moved the metric you cared about.
Background
New as a business. Not as engineers.
humano lab itself is new. The engineering behind it isn't. A selection of work shipped individually as an IC engineer at past employers:
Selected work
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Local-first AI agent runtime
Designed and built from scratch a privacy-preserving, local-first AI agent runtime in Rust — shipped as a cross-platform desktop application. Founding-engineer work, architecting the runtime, tool/protocol layer, and OAuth-based capabilities (an MCP-like architecture before MCP became a standard).
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Privacy-focused Layer-2 network
Architected and built a Layer-2 network with selective privacy and 1K+ TPS, using the open-source Ligero zero-knowledge proof system. Bootstrapped from the Sovereign SDK with substantial divergence to support the privacy and throughput design.
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Country-scale civic mobile apps
Built from scratch the official mobile applications for a national civil registry and identification agency. High-security, high-reliability software serving citizens at country scale.
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Enterprise AI-agent platform
Bootstrapped an enterprise AI-agent platform from zero-state into early product — certifies, integrates, and measures ROI of AI agents across business operations (ERP, CRM, and more).
What we believe
Opinions we are willing to defend in production.
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Real engineering over LLM duct tape.
Most "AI features" today are a prompt and a prayer. We treat AI like the systems engineering problem it actually is — with evals, instrumentation, and architecture you can defend.
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Performance is a feature.
Slow software costs money, attention, and user trust. When the inner loop matters, we reach for Rust and design for the budget the system actually has.
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Local-first, when it matters.
Some workloads belong on your servers, some on the user's machine, some neither. We pick where compute lives based on privacy, latency, and cost — not on what is fashionable.
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AI augments. Humans decide.
We build systems that make humans faster and sharper — not systems that pretend to replace the judgment a human still has to take responsibility for.
Who runs this
A small lab, by Alfredo Gallardo.
humano lab is led by Alfredo Gallardo — Staff Engineer & ex-CTO with 14+ years architecting and shipping production systems across crypto, AI, and SaaS. Founding engineer on Shinkai. Built a Layer-2 with selective privacy at dcSpark. Built Chile's Registro Civil mobile apps from scratch. Based in Chile, working with teams worldwide.
Read the full résumé →FAQ
Things people usually want to know up front.
How do you engage — fixed price, retainer, or hourly?
Fixed-price for scoped work whenever possible — both sides know what we are signing up for. Retainer for ongoing relationships. We avoid hourly because it punishes the engineer for being fast.
What time zones do you work in?
We are based in Chile (UTC−3 / UTC−4) and work comfortably with teams in the Americas, Europe, and most of EMEA. We are async-first and good at it.
How fast can you start?
Usually within two to three weeks of agreeing on scope. We take a small number of projects at a time, so the slot you book is the slot you get.
What if my problem doesn't fit one of your three services?
Talk to us anyway. The three services are the work we go deepest on, but most engagements have edges that touch all three. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you on the first call.
Do you only work remotely?
Yes. We are remote-first and have shipped that way for years. We can travel for kickoffs or critical reviews when it genuinely matters.
How big are your typical projects?
From two-week focused audits (think AI cost reductions) to multi-month builds (agent platforms, Rust core systems). We are happy to scope something smaller if it is the right starting point.
Have a problem worth
engineering properly?
We are a small, opinionated team. We take a few projects at a time and stay involved until the metric you cared about actually moves.