Ken Barlow

Founder of Recovea.

I build AI agent systems end to end: tool calling and MCP, the agent loop and its memory, evals and guardrails, retrieval, durable workflows, replay and observability, multi-agent coordination, and the interfaces people use to run them.

My focus is making agents safe, bounded and provable in production.

Previously, I was co-founder of Allset, an AI platform for the services and trades industry.

Before that, I spent ten years as a principal software engineer and engineering manager, fully remote, where I grew the engineering team to more than ten engineers and led it.

I'm open to remote consulting, contract work and full-time roles helping teams build with AI. To talk, book a call.

For my code, see my GitHub. For my full background, see my LinkedIn.

Projects

• See my repositories on GitHub.

Selected Work

• A release gate where no model grades its own work
  A cross-family LLM-as-judge: a change to a cheaper model ships only when a different model family scores it non-inferior. Recovea, 2026.
• Recovea Breaker
  A spend budget one agent run carries, declared in a request header. The call that would cross it is refused before the provider is called, and the run stays stopped until a person starts a new one. Recovea, 2026.
• Receipts anyone can re-derive
  Every model call writes a receipt into a hash-chained ledger under a published recipe, so anyone can check it offline without trusting the gateway. Refused calls are recorded too. Recovea, 2026.
• One gateway for OpenAI and Anthropic
  In the request path behind a single base URL, at about 1 ms of overhead at the median in benchmarks. Availability fails open; the caps a customer arms fail closed. Recovea, 2026.
• The Recovea Baseline
  A seven-day report from a passive tap in Node and Python that sees only a fifteen-field envelope of each call, never a prompt. It finds loop and retry signatures and models what one runaway loop could cost in a day. Recovea, 2026.
• The Recovea CLI
  Reads provider usage on your own machine and projects a month of spend, with nothing uploaded. MIT-licensed, on npm. Recovea, 2026.
• Authorization for every agent tool call
  Zanzibar-style access control (SpiceDB) deciding what an agent may do, over an append-only audit log of every action. Allset, 2025 to 2026.
• Allset
  An AI-native platform for the services and trades industry, built end to end with LLM workflows on Claude and OpenAI, and run through pilots with early users. CTO and co-founder, 2025 to 2026.
• Delivery led by coding agents
  Effectively all shipped code written by coding agents under my direction, with agent-context files in the repo and every line through my review. Allset.

Writing

• Introducing Recovea: The Financial Layer of AI
  Recovea, August 2026.
• AI spend, metered, capped, and provable
  Recovea, September 2026.
• Explore Recovea
  Recovea, September 2026.