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David Daniel

Software Engineer · Crestone, Colorado

I build developer tools and the systems underneath them. These days that's super.engineering, a Rust-native macOS app for running fleets of coding agents. Before that I was CTO at ILLA Labs and an engineer at Layer3 — ten years of production systems across fintech, crypto, and AI.

Now

super.engineering

2026 — Present

Co-Founder & Engineer

A native macOS control plane for AI coding agents. Every agent runs in its own git worktree, so a fleet of them can work in parallel without stepping on each other, and every change stays reviewable before it merges.

  • Rust top to bottom: an 82-crate Cargo workspace with a GPU-rendered UI drawing straight to Metal.
  • Terminal core built on alacritty_terminal. Agents run as plain PTY subprocesses — no LLM proxying, no protocol scraping, no API keys leaving the machine.
  • Worktree lifecycle, status projection, and hunk-level diff review over libgit2 and command-backed git, behind a concurrency gate that keeps the interactive lane responsive while background repos refresh.
  • Local-first by design: credentials stay on device and model traffic goes straight from the user's machine to their provider.
  • Took the project from zero to 4,000+ followers in under four months by building in public.

Work

ILLA Labs

2024 — 2026

CTO & Founding Engineer · Spun out of Layer3

Financial infrastructure for AI agents — an execution layer that lets a model express intent while payments, trading, lending, and prediction-market actions settle deterministically, with risk scoring and simulation sitting between the agent and the money.

  • Led a team of six across eight services and three client-facing applications.
  • Owned architecture, scoping, and technical direction from the first commit.

Layer3

2024 — 2026

Engineer → Lead

Full-stack product work on a consumer crypto platform, then leading the team that became ILLA.

  • Designed, scoped, and shipped features across six product launches, leading two.
  • Led a ten-person hackathon team building an AI agent over proprietary data that automated quest creation — shipped as Layer3 Intel.
  • Planned and launched a new major version of the core product, unifying two ecosystems with zero downtime.
  • Cut CI runtime from ~10 minutes to ~2 and pipeline cost by nearly half.

Earlier

Regen Network · Software Engineer

2021 — 2023

Delivered the contracted MVP reference implementation of Cosmos Network's group module UI, generated TypeScript definitions from ProtoBuf to keep a Go blockchain and a React frontend in sync, and merged a CRA SPA and a Gatsby site into one Next.js app — Lighthouse under 40 to 83, build times down over 80%.

SALT Lending · Senior Software Engineer

2018 — 2021

Senior engineer on a multi-service crypto lending platform. Rebuilt registration and auth for a 20% lift in new-signup retention, planned and executed the JavaScript to TypeScript migration, and mentored two junior developers.

Ideas By Nature · Software Engineer / Team Lead

2017 — 2018

Sole front-end developer on SALT Lending's token sale (>$50M raised), contributor to ShapeShift's FOX token, and lead of four front-end engineers on work for bitcoin.com, CoinDesk's Consensus, KeepKey, and coincap.io.

Cirro Web Development · Software Developer

2015 — 2017

Full-lifecycle design, development, and support of boutique web applications. SME on Ember.js and Vue.js.

Get in touch

Open to conversations about developer tooling, agentic systems, and anything native and fast. Message me on LinkedIn.