Question 1

Who is Gil Neto?

Accepted Answer

Gil Neto is a senior software engineer with 12 years' experience, based in Lisbon, Portugal. He works as a founder-engineer: contract build work for clients across backend, front-end and infrastructure, alongside two products of his own, built and run solo. Qaravel verifies bank data for accountants (Qocoa extracts and ties out bank statements, Qoriander syncs client bank accounts into the practice's own spreadsheet, Qashew is a personal finance manager), and the second brain gives an LLM agent persistent long-term memory with a scored nightly eval. Both run on one rule: the model does judgment, deterministic code does correctness.

Question 2

Does Gil Neto work on AI and LLM products?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Gil Neto works as a senior software engineer on AI products, building LLM-backed systems where the model handles judgment and deterministic code handles correctness. That covers agent memory and persistent knowledge architecture, LLM application architecture, retrieval-augmented generation, model evaluation and eval harnesses as release gates, agent orchestration, and document extraction. He is open to fractional and contract build work, based in Lisbon and remote across EU timezones.

Question 3

What AI systems has Gil Neto built?

Accepted Answer

Qocoa, former Koa, a deterministic document-extraction engine built as the deliberate alternative to vision-LLM extraction for bank statements: it forces balances to reconcile and refuses loudly rather than returning a plausible total. the pipeline of Qoriander, former Kelaro, running on durable Temporal workflows with the model kept out of the arithmetic. An agentic development pipeline called midas, which resolves every open decision before anything is specified, built on top of Matt Pocock's wayfinder model. A second-brain system giving an LLM agent persistent long-term memory: a markdown knowledge base the agent reads and writes, with capture, routing and checkpointing enforced by lifecycle hooks rather than prompts, retrieval split between generated indexes for state and vector search for specific facts, and a scored nightly eval that detects when the index has gone stale. Earlier, the LLM-integration layer at Opplane between 2021 and 2026.

Question 4

What kind of work is Gil Neto open to?

Accepted Answer

Fractional and contract build work, on whatever the product needs: the architecture, the first working version and the handover. Deepest in bank-data and accounting pipelines, LLM-backed products and agent memory. Remote across EU timezones, based in Lisbon.

Question 5

What is Gil Neto's primary tech stack?

Accepted Answer

TypeScript, Python, and SQL as primary languages. Next.js, React, Node.js, Nest.js, Fastify, Flask, and Temporal for runtime. Docker, Nginx, PostgreSQL, pgvector, MongoDB, Redis, BullMQ, Kafka on AWS and GCP for infrastructure. Integrations with Stripe, OAuth 2.0, Open Banking (PSD2), Brevo, and Umami.

Question 6

What is Gil Neto's technical philosophy?

Accepted Answer

Memory as infrastructure: an agent that forgets is a demo, so capture, routing and evaluation are enforced by the harness while judgment stays the model's job. Infrastructure-first: own the boundary from DNS to UI, everything containerized and reproducible. AI-augmented execution: leverage coding agents to eliminate boilerplate and focus on architecture and business logic.

Question 7

What products has Gil Neto shipped?

Accepted Answer

Qaravel, verified bank data for accountants: Qoriander, former Kelaro (kelaro.io), in closed beta with one pilot practice in Portugal, and Qocoa, former Koa, the deterministic bank-statement extraction engine behind it, built as the alternative to vision-LLM extraction; and a second-brain memory system for an LLM agent, running daily and documented publicly. Previously: Lead Engineer at Opplane driving monolith-to-microservices migration and LLM-integration pipelines; Front-end Lead at Glartek shipping the core industrial-IoT product.

Question 8

Where is Gil Neto based and what languages does he speak?

Accepted Answer

Based in Lisbon, Portugal. Native Portuguese, proficient English, elementary Spanish. Open to fractional and contract build work, across EU timezones.

Writing

Three exchanges died this year. The mess lands on accountants

The index was lying and the eval knew

My agent had two rules and obeyed neither

Running a second brain on an LLM agent that forgets

Running 3 SaaS products on a single Hetzner CCX23