About

I am an AI engineer working in research and development at Useme. I focus primarily on building and deploying AI systems, although my technical interests have long extended beyond artificial intelligence itself. I am interested not only in how existing solutions can be used, but also in what lies beneath them, why they work, and where they stop working.

At Useme, I work on applying AI to real processes. Among other things, I built a system that automates customer-support tickets, replaced part of a commercial solution previously used by the company, significantly reduced its cost, and received consistently positive feedback from the team using it every day. I also contribute to an EU-funded R&D project carried out together with the University of Wrocław, involving fraud detection and automated verification of digital work.

When I joined Useme's R&D team, I was initially its only member. One of my first larger tasks was to bring structure to the use of AI in software development. Before that, individual engineers experimented with AI tools independently, without a shared process or standard. After the rollout, most of the engineering team began using AI regularly while writing code, and these tools became a normal part of the development process, helping accelerate work on production releases.

My path to Useme was somewhat unusual. Before joining the company, I worked mostly with startups and as a freelancer. I had already been using Useme myself, but I was looking for a more stable place where I could develop in one direction and take responsibility for systems operating at a larger scale. Instead of waiting for an open recruitment process, I sent a cold email directly to the company's CEO. The response was positive. I still remember that day well, because that message eventually led to a job that significantly changed the direction of my professional development.

At the time, I did not have much experience with large production systems. I gained it quickly, moving from small projects and prototypes to systems that became part of real business processes. It also changed the way I think about AI. The model itself is usually only a small part of the problem. In practice, data, evaluation, observability, cost, reliability, rollback mechanisms, and the response of the people who actually use the system are just as important.

Research and security

Outside work, I experiment with language models, information retrieval, and the security of AI systems. I am particularly interested in testing hypotheses that appear somewhere between established fields. Sometimes they lead to something useful; sometimes they end in a negative result. In either case, they replace an assumption with evidence. Through my work on information retrieval, I received an endorsement allowing me to submit to arXiv, and I am preparing my first research paper for publication.

Another area I regularly return to is cybersecurity. I have reported vulnerabilities affecting products and systems from Intel, AMD, OpenAI, Wirtualna Polska, Reincubate, and other organizations.

Over time, I became particularly interested in reverse engineering Windows drivers. What appeals to me is the directness of the impact: a flaw in an ordinary application is often confined to that application, while a flaw at the boundary between a driver, the kernel, and hardware can immediately have consequences at the level of the entire operating system. These boundaries between layers of abstraction are usually where I find the most interesting problems.

Background

I started programming as a teenager. At first, I built games, websites, and small applications and published some of them online. One browser game I created at around the age of fifteen was played more than 10,000 times within a few months of being published on itch.io and Kongregate. It was not a large commercial project, but it was the first time I saw something I had built reach thousands of people on the other side of the internet.

At seventeen, I started working as a freelancer. My first paid commission was worth about $14. Over time, individual jobs became regular work, and I moved from websites and automation through backend development and machine learning into security, AI systems, and research and development.

It was never a particularly planned career path. I usually chose the next problem because it seemed more difficult, more unusual, or simply more interesting than the previous one.

Writing

I also write about my own experiments and research. Most often, I try to write the kind of technical material I would want to read myself: a concrete problem, an experiment, and an explanation of what actually came out of it.

My writing on AI, security, and software systems has been featured or recommended by Andriy Burkov, Gwern.net, ML Times, True Positive Weekly, Zaufana Trzecia Strona, BadCyber, and other authors and publications in the AI and cybersecurity communities. One of my articles on Windows driver testing also reached #6 on Hacker News and was later covered by OSNews.

How I think

In technology, I am most interested in what exists beneath the surface of the systems I use. I like high-level abstractions as long as they do their job. When they stop doing so, I look underneath them. Many of my projects begin exactly this way: by trying to understand a mechanism, noticing an unusual connection between existing ideas, and building an experiment to see whether something useful can be done with it.

I have also been somewhat obsessed with innovation since childhood. I am fascinated by the idea of creating something that nobody has created before, or finding a solution that nobody else has noticed. I see that as one of the most interesting paths toward personal success, but I do not see innovation as an individualistic pursuit. To me, the most valuable idea is one that eventually becomes larger than its author: something that can be shared, adapted to the needs of other people, and, in the best case, change at least a small part of the world.

There is also a desire to leave something real behind. I would like my footprint not to end with a mark once left in the sand on a beach in Gdańsk, or ultimately with a name carved into a gravestone. The possibility of leaving behind an idea, a technology, or a discovery that continues to exist independently, helps other people, and remains part of the world after I am gone is much more meaningful to me. Perhaps the highest form of recognition is when a person and their work become part of recorded history — appearing in studies, archives, or encyclopedias — not for the sake of the name itself, but because they created something important enough to be remembered.

Beyond engineering

Beyond technology, I am interested in philosophy, history, economics, and electronics. Marxism has a particular place among those interests: as a philosophy, a method for analyzing society and the economy, and a starting point for thinking about how technological development changes the conditions under which production and the allocation of resources can be organized.

I am especially interested in whether problems that historically limited effective large-scale economic coordination can be approached differently with modern computing. The development of computational power, optimization, artificial intelligence, and systems capable of processing enormous amounts of information creates possibilities that were technically out of reach only a few decades ago.

Electronics, in turn, is a return to the most physical layer of technology for me. After years spent mostly working with software, I have become increasingly interested in what happens below the operating system and the code: microprocessors, digital circuits, communication with hardware, and building things whose behaviour can be observed somewhere other than on a screen.

Contact

I am open to technical collaboration, consulting, security research, research correspondence, and interesting professional opportunities.

You can reach me at piotr@bednars.me.