Elliott Short

Day job

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Model
DANTE v1
Products
Illumina, WrapQuotes, Retrospecter
Community
216K on Discord
Open source
48 Hangout repos
01 About

By day I direct applied AI and machine learning at Moody's. On my own time I train decision models and run three products. I also own The Programmer's Hangout, a Discord server with 216,442 members, which its staff run day to day.

01
Role
Director, Applied AI & ML, Moody's
02
Builds
Decision models, agent memory, vertical SaaS
03
Community
Owner, The Programmer's Hangout
04
GitHub
@elliottshort, since 2012

Stack

  • Python
  • Rust
  • TypeScript
  • Kotlin
  • Svelte
  • PyTorch
  • llama.cpp
  • Next.js
  • AWS
02 Work

Things I've built and still run.

A decision model, a memory engine for agents, quoting software for vehicle wrap shops, and a retro tool for engineering teams.

01 ∕ Decision model

DANTE v1

Decisions as next-⁠token estimates.

Give it evidence, a question and the options, and it returns a probability for every option from one forward pass. It writes no text. The answer is its next-token distribution over the option letters, so a decision costs one prefill and the probabilities double as confidence.

Output from the playground 1 forward pass
“The invoice total is double the price we were quoted.”

Which team should own this ticket?

  • billing 97.98%
  • technical support 1.13%
  • shipping 0.89%

I also wrote the Decision Model Protocol, a draft spec for how software asks a model to decide.

  • 4B, fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-4B
  • 84.5% on the dev set, up from 64.3% for the base model
  • Pick one, yes or no, or a score
  • GGUF builds for llama.cpp
  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • LoRA
  • llama.cpp
Try it
02 ∕ Agent memory

Illumina

Long-term memory for AI agents.

A hosted memory engine. You send it raw text and files, and Illumina pulls out the facts, the entities and the links between them. Search combines semantic, keyword, graph and time-based retrieval, then ranks results by relevance, recency and how many sources agree. When a new fact contradicts an old one, Illumina marks the old one expired and keeps it on record.

  1. commit()

    Send notes, PDFs or transcripts. Illumina extracts the facts and links them.

  2. search()

    Ask in plain language and get ranked facts with their sources.

  3. illuminate()

    Ask an open question, and Illumina reasons over everything you've stored.

  • REST, Python & TypeScript SDKs
  • Hosted MCP server
  • Rust core
  • Rust
  • TypeScript
  • AWS
illumina.sh
03 ∕ Vertical SaaS

WrapQuotes

Quoting software for vehicle wrap shops.

Working shops contributed and checked panel-by-panel measurements for 5,300+ vehicle models. A shop can ballpark a job in 30 seconds and send a formal quote in under five minutes.

  • 5,300+ vehicle models
  • Other currencies and metric units
  • Quote from inside Claude over MCP
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • MCP
wrapquotes.com
04 ∕ Team tool

Retrospecter

Team retros that keep track of the action items.

Each team gets a room for brainstorming, voting and discussion. Action items carry over to the next retro, and their owners get reminders until they close them. You pay one flat price per room.

  1. 01 Brainstorm
  2. 02 Vote
  3. 03 Discuss
  4. 04 Act
  5. 05 Follow up
  • $8 per room / month
  • Action-item follow-ups
  • Multiple team rooms
  • Svelte
  • TypeScript
retrospecter.app
03 Community

The Programmer's Hangout

194,798

Members on Discord

The Programmer's Hangout is one of the largest programming communities on Discord. I own it, and its staff run it. They moderate the server and help members every day, and they deserve the credit for it.

The bots, sites and tools behind the server are open source on GitHub.

Online now
25,301
Public repos
48
Live ∕ discord.gg/programming Refreshed hourly
Open source on GitHub