Delaney Burke

Designed and built an auditable substrate for autonomous agents: append-only, hash-chained ledgers in which every declared truth, derived belief and completed leg of work is an immutable block, verifiable after the fact.

• axiom — signed, hash-chained ground-truth chain with its own WAL, cursors and query engine; supersession is a new block, never an edit, so history cannot be rewritten
• World model & simulation — blast-radius analysis and counterfactual "flip this premise" runs answer what breaks if this stops being true before the change is made
• mem — a structurally separate belief chain with confidence, decay, reinforcement and supersession, so machine inference can never be mistaken for human-declared fact
• flow — append-only queue with independent cursors: the transport a multi-agent swarm reads and writes without a broker
• Shipped as a CLI, an MCP server (29 tools) and 7 Claude Code skills — the primitives are usable by a human at a terminal and by an agent mid-task, from the same chains
• Architectural invariant enforced by test, not convention — a dedicated decoupling suite fails the build if any primitive reaches for another; all cross-chain wiring stays in a single 400-line integration layer
• ~30,000 lines of Rust across 7 crates; 200 tests, all green

Built a delivery pipeline that spends frontier tokens only where judgment is required: a frontier model authors the contract, a fleet of small local models on LXD answers it best-of-N, and a mechanical test gate — never a model — decides pass or fail.

• 77% of frontier authoring spend eliminated, measured against a counterfactual ledger that prices every landed unit at real list rates — with the irreducible spec/review overhead reported alongside, never netted off
• One contract, four languages — the same behavioural spec projects into RSpec, pytest, vitest and cargo test, so a rule is proven identical in Ruby, Python, TypeScript and Rust; the contract is the portable asset, the language is a parameter
• Learned pre-screen critic — 8-feature logistic head, 0.76 held-out AUC under whole-spec cross-validation, wired ranking-only: proved it can reorder candidates but never drop one, so a weak model cuts 62.5% of gate runs with zero correctness risk
• Best-of-N turns unreliable cheap workers into a reliable pipeline, and worker disagreement doubles as a running audit of which contracts are too loose
• 358 specs green; every design decision sealed as a signed block in a 185-block truth chain, each recorded with its honest bounds and the options it closed

Founded and run an independent practice: technical due diligence for investors, followed by embedded engineering leadership inside the companies they back.

• Designed and delivered The Gate, a fixed-fee diligence assessment — written verdicts in ten working days covering feasibility, cost to build, dependency and platform risk, IP provenance, security exposure, and whether the team as constituted can deliver
• Structured every engagement for independence — no equity held while a verdict is formed, terms frozen during assessment, and the full report delivered unredacted to founder and investor simultaneously
• Led post-investment builds — technical direction, architecture and build supervision, hiring the permanent engineering team, then standing down as it stood up
• Authored ground and sluice (above) — the verification substrate the diligence work runs on, and the build fleet that kept delivery cost tracking task difficulty
• Built deep Claude Code expertise: custom agents, hooks, skills, MCP servers and plugin development; heterogeneous local inference fleets on LXD routed by model tier
• Earlier studio work: video platform optimisation (30% faster uploads, 70% deployment reduction), Swift iOS applications, ElasticSearch analytics pipelines