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# Quick bits

I'm a builder. I optimize systems wherever I find them. Put me in a room where people are planning and I turn abstract goals into something running.

Focus: knowledge engineering, integration engineering, automation. Determinism first, agents on top.

Taking conversations now for early and founding engineer roles, contract engineering, and fractional work. Graduating Fall 2026 from UC Berkeley, B.S. EECS. Available December. Best fit for small teams where the process and product are greenfield, and "figure it out" is the job description. Domain matters less than problem type and team fit.

Working on something? Let's spend an hour on it. You bring the problem, we work it together, and see how it feels. Reach me through the form below, or email me direct at hello@alexhagemeister.dev

# What I'm working on

Exocortex

Open source 2026

  • An agent-maintained personal knowledge system: an AI agent compiles notes, conversations, and documents into a provenance-tracked wiki, governed by rules and skills shipped as pure markdown.
  • Designed the trust model. Every claim traces to a source, agent writes are gated by status rather than blocked, and curation stays a human act by design.
  • Runs my actual life and work daily. Open-sourced as an installable program with an agent-run setup wizard.

Claude Code · Agents · Knowledge Engineering · Harness Engineering · MCP · Markdown

Operator Intake Platform

Contract work 2026

  • Sole engineer on the operator intake system for a real-estate investment platform: a multi-step branching application (~70 fields), taken from demo-first prototype to production.
  • Built a pitch-deck upload pipeline that parses decks with an LLM and prefills the application, extracting only high-confidence fields, plus submission sanitization and invite-only dashboard access.
  • Postgres as the single canonical store, serverless APIs, form copy the client edits in a config file without touching code.

Supabase · PostgreSQL · Vercel · LLM APIs · Systems Integration · Full-Stack

GNADD

Open source 2026

  • Git-Native Agent-Driven Development: a workflow where GitHub issues, branches, PRs, and git history are the sole system of record for AI coding agents.
  • Seven operational agent skills drive the loop, from issue capture through gated resolution, backed by a tested deterministic script that enforces the git invariants in code.
  • Installs into any agent the skills CLI supports (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex).

Claude Code · Cursor · Agents · Bash · Git · GitHub CLI

KRUX

Contract work, athlete skincare brand 2026

  • R&D and innovation contractor to the founder of an early-stage athlete skincare brand.
  • Built a provenance-tracked corpus from meeting transcripts, expert interviews, and research passes, then compiled the deliverables out of it rather than prompting them: a competitive landscape across eleven brands, a vetted contract-manufacturer list, and a product-development playbook.
  • Set the founder up with his own instance of the same agent-run knowledge system, so the corpus stays useful to his team after the contract ends.

Claude Code · Agents · Knowledge Engineering · Market Research · Product Development · MCP

# Previously (Berkeley era)

Highly Adaptive Ridge

Published ML research, Center for Targeted Machine Learning 2022 – 2024

  • Sole undergraduate on a graduate/postgraduate research team for 2+ years, from community college through Berkeley.
  • Co-authored a novel kernel ridge regression method with dimension-free convergence guarantees, outperforming existing approaches on small tabular datasets (Schuler, Hagemeister, van der Laan, 2024).

Python · R · NumPy · SciPy · scikit-learn · Matplotlib

SPLAT

Berkeley-funded EdTech pilot 2024

  • Lead developer on a RAG-powered AI tutoring platform, studied with faculty across 3 courses and 200+ students.
  • Built the end-to-end ingestion pipeline for heterogeneous course materials (PDF, Markdown, LaTeX): cleaning, chunking, embedding, and retrieval with context-aware prompting for course-specific answers.
  • Instructor upload interface in TypeScript and Supabase. Student access delivered via Custom GPT.

Python · RAG · LangChain · FastAPI · Pinecone · OpenAI API

# The Before-times

Sushi Chef

Sushi Spot, Humboldt County 2018 – 2020

  • Learned sushi off YouTube, then talked my way into the job. First person the restaurant ever hired straight onto the bar without the usual back-of-house progression.
  • Cleared for the advanced omakase and sashimi work faster than any chef there before me. Broke down whole salmon from the twice-weekly deliveries.
  • 80 to 100 covers a shift, open to close.

Knife skills · Whole-fish butchery · Omakase · High-volume service

Off-Grid Infrastructure

Remote agricultural properties, Humboldt County 2014 – 2018

  • Built and ran the power, water, and irrigation systems for remote agricultural land. No grid and no municipal water, so everything on site was something somebody had to design, install, and keep running.
  • Solar from site assessment through commissioning, plus generators, electrical, and the buildings around them. Ran excavators and loaders for grading and site work.
  • Managed seasonal crews of 60+ across concurrent sites: scheduling, logistics into places the supply chain does not reach, and safety protocols.

Off-grid solar · Water & irrigation · Heavy equipment · Crew management

Large-Scale Art Installations

Burning Man, Black Rock Desert 2011 – 2015

  • Five consecutive build seasons on some of the most ambitious installations in the event's history. Crews ran 20 to 200 people. A build was 8+ months of full-time work, fabricating modular components in town and a month assembling on site.
  • Design, carpentry, metalwork, pyrotechnics, and lighting. Built a propane flame system with 17 individually controllable heads. Worked out a way to make compound curves in plywood, then led the team that used it to build an 18-foot lotus flower.
  • It all got trucked to the desert, assembled, and most of it burned at the end of the week.

Fabrication · Metalwork · Pyrotechnics · Crew coordination

Singer / Guitarist

She Has a Fashion Vice, Reno 2008 – 2011

  • Founded the band, wrote the songs, sang and played guitar. Two albums, professionally recorded.
  • Biggest band in Reno at the time. Radio play, and a full U.S. tour.

Songwriting · Guitar · Vocals · Touring

# Contact