Hitesh Aidasani
Senior software engineer — AI/LLM and platform engineering. New York City.
I've spent 25+ years building production software, from enterprise platforms used by 100,000+ people to real-time AI systems and the apps on my own Apple TV. Lately I work at the intersection of LLMs, on-device AI, and full-stack/platform engineering — and I ship: tvOS and iOS apps, FastAPI backends, and code in one of the most-used open-weights AI projects.
Before going independent I spent nine years at Merck, where I built Barnum — an enterprise Q&A platform that reached 100,000+ users across every North American clinical trial and is still in production — and led a team of up to six engineers.
Selected Work
Stagecouch
A multi-tenant streaming platform I designed and built solo: two branded Apple TV apps on one FastAPI/MongoDB backend, ~350 commits in five months. Real-time audio DSP, a 25+ Metal-shader visualizer library, and a data pipeline that turns messy archive metadata into real song titles.
ink-ai
The backend behind real-time, LLM-driven characters for an open-world Unreal Engine game. Live game-state (weather, location, mood) injected into each character's prompt so they respond in-world. Demoed at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2024.
Apps
- StageCouch — live concert recordings on Apple TV, built for the taping community.
- AJ Tapes — the Aadam Jacobs Collection (2,300+ live recordings) on Apple TV.
- HackerNewsTV — an ambient React Native tvOS dashboard that cycles Hacker News stories with streamed audio.
- Freely Spoken — private, on-device Bible-verse reflection for iOS. Transcription and analysis happen on the device; only sanitized text leaves it.
- Idle Ashes — Dhammapada-based reflection for iOS, same privacy-first architecture.
Open Source
NousResearch/hermes-agent (149k★) — fixes to the OpenViking memory plugin: pseudo-URI normalization, response-shape hardening across server versions, per-level truncation, exception fallback, and regression tests. Three of my commits were preserved as the foundation of the maintainer's consolidated fix (April 2026).
Writing
Links