Narasimha Badrinath

I build AI agents that survive the real world.

I'm a Staff Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean. I build AI apps and agents, contribute to the open-source tools developers use to ship them, and write about what I learn.

Selected work

The three projects I'd show an engineer first

Voice assistant for macOS

Nix

Nix lives in my Mac's menu bar. I say "Hey Nix", ask something, and it answers out loud. The thinking is done by whichever coding agent I'm signed in to (Claude Code, Codex or Antigravity), so it can read files, run commands and use my tools, within permissions I set. Speech recognition runs on the Mac with Whisper, five times faster than a hosted service (265ms against 1.3s), and the audio never leaves the machine.

500+ commits · Swift app with a local Node service

Agent security

GuardianAI

Watches every tool call an agent makes and checks it against eight rules based on the OWASP LLM Top 10, covering prompt injection, leaked secrets, data exfiltration, SSRF and dangerous shell commands. Any FastAPI or Express app connects with two lines of code.

Open source · Python and TypeScript SDKs

Benchmark

Agent Memory Showdown

I benchmarked four LangChain memory backends over a 50-turn conversation. Vector memory kept 82% recall at about a tenth of the cost of keeping the full history.

Recall at turn 50 and cost per 1,000 conversations. Highlighted rows are the best value.
BackendRecallCost
Buffer90%$4,303
Qdrant (best value)82%$418
pgvector (best value)82%$416
Summary42%$2,256

5 runs per backend · Claude for generation, MiniLM embeddings

Open source I maintain and contribute to

Writing

Start here. Each one is built on something I ran and measured.

More things I've built

Live apps and side projects, one line each

Live apps

  • ArchitectAIDescribe an app and watch agents plan, generate and check a cloud architecture for it.
  • Multi-Agent Travel PlannerSpawns parallel research agents to build an itinerary with maps.
  • Dead Startups RoastPick a failed startup, get it roasted by AI, then see how you'd rebuild it today.

iOS apps

  • DailyBrickOffline habit tracker with streaks and widgets. No accounts, no subscription.
  • Silly DebatesPeople argue absurd topics for 24 hours, then AI reads every opinion and picks a winner.
  • FlipItCard-matching game with five themed decks and global leaderboards.

Speaking

Talks, workshops and the occasional architecture review

Narasimha Badrinath on stage, presenting on running AI/ML workloads on DigitalOcean
Running AI/ML workloads on DigitalOcean

I give talks and run hands-on workshops on AI agents and taking LLM apps to production. I also review agent architectures for a few teams.

I'm always up for a meetup, conference or workshop. The easiest way to reach out is below.

Let's connect.

I'm always happy to talk about AI agents, developer tools, talks and workshops. Pick whichever channel suits you.