No handoffs, because there is nobody to hand off to
Design, engineering, and QA are one job here. The seams where projects usually fray — spec to build, build to test — simply are not there.
The studio
One independent AI engineer. The whole studio.
ArtJeck Technology is the Sacramento practice of Eugene Menshikov — an independent AI engineer who came up through software quality and never dropped the habit. This page is who you are actually hiring.
Eugene Menshikov
Independent AI Engineer
Sacramento, CA — working across the SF Bay Area and remote
- automated tests on the IFTA agent
- 429automated tests on the IFTA agent
- systems shipped and documented
- 8systems shipped and documented
- of the code handed to the client
- 100%of the code handed to the client
How I got here
I came to AI through software quality.
I came to AI through software quality, not the other way around. Before I was building agents I was the person who found the reason a release broke — equivalence partitioning, boundary values, decision tables, state transitions. Unfashionable work, and it turns out to be exactly the skill this moment is short of.
Because the hard part of an AI product is not the demo. A demo needs a model to be right once, in front of a friendly audience. A production system needs it to be right on the input nobody thought to try, on a Tuesday, when the number lands on a tax return. Those are different engineering problems, and most of the industry is still shipping the first one.
So I build the way the second problem demands. Deterministic code does anything exact. The model does judgment and language. Evaluations run like tests, in CI, against cases that once went wrong. Anything irreversible stops for a human. On the IFTA filing agent that discipline produced 429 automated tests and a backtest that matched a Kentucky carrier's official state filing to the penny — a claim I can make because it is checkable, not because it sounds good.
And you are hiring one person, which is the other half of it. I scope the work, design it, build it, test it, and hand it over. There is no account manager translating what you said, no junior quietly learning on your budget, and nothing lost between three teams. When something is hard I tell you it is hard.
Why independent
What you get that an agency cannot sell you.
Not a slogan — three structural differences, and the case where the answer goes the other way.
Senior hands on the actual work
Agencies staff a pyramid: senior people sell, junior people build. You get the person who answered your first email, on every line of it.
A fixed quote, and you own the result
The price is agreed in writing before work starts. The repository, the accounts, and the documentation are yours — no platform fee, no dependency on me.
When you should hire an agency instead
If you need four workstreams running in parallel next month, or a vendor whose bus factor is greater than one, that is a real requirement and I am not it. I take work where depth and accountability matter more than headcount — and I will tell you which one you have on the first call.
Proof
Everything above is checkable.
Live systems, named test counts, and public repositories — not adjectives.
IFTA Filing Agent
The case study behind the 429 tests and the to-the-penny backtest: deterministic math, an AI reviewer, a human approving the filing.
Read itSales Agent
Eight marketplaces behind one adapter interface, with an approval gate in front of anything irreversible. A sanitized showcase is public.
Read itSoftware Testing & QA
The testing practice on its own: independent functional, regression and edge-case coverage on software another team built.
Read itMore of the code is public on GitHub, including the RAG assistant and the MCP control plane that run the lab this studio is built on.
Where I work
Sacramento-based. Working further out.
The studio is in Sacramento, and that is where in-person work is easiest. I take Bay Area projects on-site when it helps — a workshop to map a workflow, a launch week — and remotely the rest of the time. Clients outside California are normal; the IFTA carrier is in Kentucky.
If you want the local detail, AI automation in Sacramento, for San Francisco startups, and across the Bay Area each cover the work that actually comes up there.
Talk to the engineer.
There isn't anyone else to talk to. Tell me what you're trying to build and you'll get an honest read on whether it's worth doing, and what it costs.