Hey there 👋 I'm

AdeenShukla

I build products and teams, and write about what I learn along the way.

Building technology, leading engineers, navigating careers, and figuring out what changes when AI enters the room.

CTO @ Metafic • Building Leadnics • Writer & Speaker

Read my writing See what I'm building

Working on something interesting? [email protected]

Adeen Shukla on the Great Wall of China — Great Wall of China

Right now

LeadingMetaficCTO. We run AI-accelerated engineering pods that ship production software.
BuildingLeadnicsA CRM for sellers who meet their prospects in person.
Open-sourcingmcp-gateway & promptslayAI infrastructure I build when nobody is paying me to.
WritingBuilding, working, thinkingEssays on products, engineering, AI and careers.

Writing

What I think about

Essays from someone who builds things. Mostly about how technology changes the way we build and work.

All essays

Thinking5 min read

Painting an owl (or why "creating" matters)

Try creating something with your hands, without distractions. It might unblock you and show you a completely different side of things.

Jun 29, 2026

Working8 min read

Education in the Age of LLMs: Stop Grading the Robot's Homework

Every essay your school assigns tonight will be written by a machine in eleven seconds. We can keep pretending otherwise, or we can rebuild education for the world that actually exists.

Jun 10, 2026

Thinking7 min read

The New Frugality: Why Gen-Z Chooses Experience Over Savings

The Great Generational Money Divide I track every expense across 17 different apps, credit cards, and investment platforms. I have spreadsheets that w...

Jul 17, 2025

Building

What I'm building now

A product, and the open-source AI infrastructure I build when nobody is paying me to.

Everything I've built

2024

Leadnics

Trade-show leads die in business-card piles and spreadsheets. Leadnics is a CRM for people who meet prospects in person: scan a badge or card, AI enriches and scores the contact, and follow-ups fire before you leave the booth.

CRM
AI
Mobile
OCR

Visit

2026

MCP Gateway

Connecting N agents to M MCP servers turns into an N×M mess of auth, limits and failures. One secure, observable endpoint in front of all of them: auth, RBAC, rate limiting, caching, OpenTelemetry and circuit breakers.

TypeScript
MCP
AI Infrastructure
Observability

Code

2026

promptslay

Prompts are code, so why don't we test them like code? Unit tests for prompts: deterministic and LLM-as-judge graders, snapshot baselines, cost tracking, and a CI gate that fails the build on drift.

TypeScript
LLM Evals
Testing
CI

Code

Speaking

Talks & workshops

20+ developer events organized and taught since 2018, reaching 3,500+ people. These days I talk about building careers, AI in production, and leading engineers.

Speaking page

Adeen on stage at DevFest '23, presenting Building Platform Independent Startups — DevFest '23: Building Platform Independent Startups

01
Build first, the roadmap appears later
Students & early-career engineers
Why "what should I learn?" is the wrong question, and what to build instead.
02
AI in production, beyond the demo
Engineering teams
Evals, gateways, and the boring distributed-systems engineering AI products still need.
03
From developer to CTO
Engineers moving into leadership
What changes when your job stops being writing the code.
04
Building developer communities
Organizers & DevRel
Lessons from starting codeIndore() and co-organizing GDG Indore.

Invite me to speak See past events

About

The non-linear version

I've been on both sides of the room. At 19 I was the student asking what I should learn, organizing hackathons, porting operating systems to phones that didn't need them, and teaching Git to anyone who'd sit still. Now I'm the one students ask.

In between: a GitHub Campus Expert badge, co-organizing GDG Indore, going from engineer to CTO at Metafic, building Leadnics, and somehow ending up in ISB Hyderabad's venture program. None of it followed a roadmap. I built things, and the roadmap appeared afterwards.

When I'm not in the code, I'm mixing beats, documenting my cold brew obsession, or reading whatever my book club picked this month.

Shipping code since: 2016; Shipping code since
Events organized & workshops taught: 20+; Events organized & workshops taught
People reached at those events: 3,500+; People reached at those events
Hyderabad, venture program: ISB; Hyderabad, venture program

How I got here

2016
Ported Sailfish OS to a Redmi 2
Android kernels, device trees and vendor blobs, before I knew what any of it was for.
2018
Started codeIndore()
Organized my first hackathon at 19, became a GitHub Campus Expert, and taught Git to anyone who'd sit still.
2019
Co-organized GDG Indore
DevFest'19 for 400 developers, plus hackathons, study jams and meetups across the city.
Engineer to CTO at Metafic
Went from writing the code to building the team that writes it.
2023
Spoke at DevFest '23
"Building Platform Independent Startups", on the stage I used to organize.
2024
Started building Leadnics
A CRM for people who close deals with a handshake.
ISB Hyderabad, venture program
Went back to school to learn the business side of what I build.
Now
Building, writing, speaking
Open-source AI infrastructure, essays here, and back in rooms full of students.