grant starkman
Grant Starkman

Building in Utah

Hi, I’m Grant.

I build software and hardware that ships, from ESP32 firmware to AWS backends. Lately I test how AI coding agents hold up against prompt injection.

An orange waveform lit up on an LED matrix, from the PixelPulse display PixelPulse
LED matrix / ESP32Utah, USA
  • FocusAI agent security
  • ShipsHardware + software
  • BaseUtah, USA
  • StackESP32 to AWS

Now building

Sep 2026
ChannelInstagram

@kernel.panic.0x11

Security and AI experiments, tested on camera with real hardware: a $30 radio against cellular networks, a photo turned into a 3D-printed key, AI coding agents under prompt injection. 3,000+ followers; the cellular reel passed 50,000 views.

instagram.com/kernel.panic.0x11
(opens in a new tab)
  1. 01

    Photo to Key ProductLive

    Turns two photos of a key you own into an experimental 3D-printable model. It grew out of a reel that passed 45,000 views.

    (opens in a new tab)
  2. 02

    TURNCOAT AI securityOpen source

    A prompt-injection benchmark for AI coding agents. The payload corpus and methodology are open on GitHub; results are under Research below.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  3. 03

    cell-survey SDROpen source

    A passive cellular downlink survey for a $30 RTL-SDR: which bands are live, how strong, and how busy. Receive only; it decodes nothing.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  4. 04

    aetherscope SDROpen source

    A local multi-band ground station that runs off one RTL-SDR dongle, with a web dashboard that is honest about what each piece can and cannot do.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  5. 05

    camsweep + rf-detector HardwareDefensive

    Hidden-camera detection. camsweep flags likely cameras on a WiFi network you’re using; rf-detector, an ESP32 build, finds transmitters that never join the network.

  6. 06

    TILT GameLive

    A flying game you steer by tilting your phone, or use your phone as a motion controller for your laptop. No app to install.

    (opens in a new tab)
  7. 07

    Slide Rule AILive

    Grades PowerPoint decks against top consulting-firm standards with Claude on Amazon Bedrock, returning an overall score and category scores.

    (opens in a new tab)
  8. 08

    DriveLab EducationLive

    A browser car-building sandbox for kids: pick an engine, tires and aero on a budget, then run time trials to see how each choice changes performance.

    (opens in a new tab)

Field guides

Companions to the experiments

Free guides that go deeper than a reel: how each experiment works, where it stops, and code you can run on your own devices.

Selected work

09 projects
01 / FlagshipHardware

PixelPulse

A smart LED matrix display with live weather, crypto and flight data, running custom firmware on ESP32 microcontrollers.

pixelpulse.grantstarkman.com
(opens in a new tab)
  1. 02

    BeeBase AIMultimodal

    Provenance-first multimodal AI for beekeeping. Text, hive photos and audio combine into an early-warning assistant for hive health.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  2. 03

    whoami-dataviz AIDataviz

    A 3D map of engineering identity. Every repo is embedded by what the code does and how it’s written, then clustered, labeled by AI and explorable as a point cloud.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  3. 04

    Phosphoros Open source

    A durable browser terminal built on ghostty-web, node-pty and tmux, with WebSocket reconnect and full session replay.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  4. 05

    AI DevOps Agent AIAWS

    An autonomous engineering assistant on Amazon Bedrock: Claude with MCP tool loops, semantic code search across 254 repositories, and incident investigations from Slack.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  5. 06

    CANaryExtractor Automotive

    Reverse-engineers CAN-bus UDS diagnostic captures to extract and diff ECU firmware flash data from a Bosch engine controller.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  6. 07

    code-dna ML

    A code-fingerprinting engine that profiles structural idioms, naming and complexity across languages with tree-sitter and ML, for authorship analysis.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  7. 08

    featherweight Rust

    The read path of an online ML feature store in Rust on Redis, serving fraud-detection features at sub-millisecond p99 latency.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)
  8. 09

    league-roast-bot AIDiscord

    A savage Discord bot that pulls live League of Legends stats from the Riot API and has Claude roast players by name.

    (source on GitHub, opens in a new tab)

AI security research

TURNCOAT

A benchmark I run on AI coding agents. Each agent works inside an isolated sandbox seeded with prompt-injection attacks: system-prompt leaks, persona overrides, unauthorized tool use, context overflow and indirect injection. Findings go to the maintainers first and are listed only after coordinated disclosure.

Experience

8+ years
  1. May 2024 –
    Aug 2025

    DevOps Engineer

    Nexio · Salt Lake City, UT
    • Designed and launched an enterprise AI DevOps platform from scratch on Amazon Bedrock: Claude with 30+ MCP tools running autonomous production investigations.
    • Built semantic code search indexing 17,000+ documents across 254 repositories with OpenSearch vector stores.
    • Deployed a production MCP server for AI IDEs across the organization; ran daily PCI-DSS monitoring and CVE remediation.
  2. Nov 2023 –
    May 2024

    Senior Software Engineer

    Thatch · Orem, UT
    • Built frontend features for a dual-sided React application at 90% code coverage.
    • Developed serverless APIs on PostgreSQL with Sequelize, cutting query times by 30%.
  3. Dec 2022 –
    Nov 2023

    Cloud Engineer

    Amazon Web Services · Denver, CO
    • Shipped AWS CodeCatalyst CI/CD actions (CloudFront invalidation, Terraform execution) available to millions of customers.
    • Led a React and TypeScript refund-operations dashboard on Cloudscape, cutting processing time by 25%.
    • Founded and ran the open-source CodeCatalyst GitHub organization for community-built actions.
  4. Nov 2019 –
    Aug 2022

    Electronics Technician II

    JT4 · Las Vegas, NV
    • Built real-time Unix data-processing environments in C++ and Qt, ingesting UDP and TCP/IP streams from up to 15 Ethernet servers; delivered six months early.
    • Debugged from hardware to network with oscilloscopes and Wireshark; restored a five-system dependency chain in two minutes during a time-critical event.

Stack

AI & agents
MCP servers and tools, agent loops, Claude API, prompt engineering, RAG, LLM integration
Languages
C++, C, TypeScript, Python, Java, Go, Rust
Frontend
React, Angular, Next.js, Material UI, custom component libraries
Backend & cloud
Node.js, Laravel, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFront, Route 53, Docker, Terraform
Databases
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis
Hardware
ESP32, Arduino, PlatformIO, Linux, Qt

About

I’m an engineer in Utah. I design circuits, write firmware, build full-stack web apps, and ship products.

Education
BS in Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
AS in Electronics, ITT Tech
Certifications
AWS Certified Developer
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Focus
Full-stack development, embedded firmware, AI agents and their security
Contact
The quickest way to reach me is LinkedIn (opens in a new tab).