In the Workshop MMXXVI A one-person affair

A small
workshop.
Serious
software.

Bespoke engineering, AI adoption, and intelligent automation - taken on as commissions, built from the raw material up, and shipped to small businesses across Suffolk and Cambridgeshire that need the real thing, not another subscription.

Proprietor   Andrei Trimbitas Est.   Kennett, 2020

Commissions open Book a half hour or write instead

The first half hour is free, and it usually settles whether this is a small piece of work or a large one before any money is discussed.

A note from the proprietor

Twenty years inside the industry taught me something I keep returning to: there is no one size fits all - not technically, not financially, not in the way a small business actually works day to day. The shapes that suit the largest organisations seldom suit the smallest hands. Old Forge is the workshop I wanted to find and couldn't. Commissions, not subscriptions. Built to fit the hand that'll use it.

A.T. - Kennett, Suffolk.

§ 01

The work of the workshop

One trade
and what holds it up

The commission this workshop is for

Artificial intelligence that earns its place.

Most of what is sold as AI is a subscription with a chat box on it. The work here starts from the other end - find the place in the week where the same question gets answered fifteen times, or where somebody reads a long document to retrieve one number, and build the smallest thing that removes it. Models chosen for the job, not for the marketing deck.

If the honest answer after looking is that it would not earn its place, that is the answer you get. The half hour it takes to find out costs nothing either way.

  • Document search that finds the thing, across your own material.
  • Support and triage that does not burn the reputation you built.
  • Models run where the data is allowed to be - hosted, or on hardware you own.

From £2,500 for a focused proof of concept. Quoted per commission, after a conversation.

What this involves →

And the trades it rests on

AI that earns its place is mostly ordinary engineering wearing a new hat. These are the trades underneath it, and each is commissioned on its own just as often.

  1. Custom software built to fit your hand Web apps, internal tools and integrations shaped around how the business actually runs.
  2. Intelligent automation hours, returned The repeatable work that eats an afternoon, handled quietly while you do something worth doing.
  3. Cybersecurity at the scale of the business MSc-level cyber applied with a light hand. Cyber Essentials is held here, not just advised on.
  4. Cloud infrastructure foundations that hold Set up properly, watched properly, handed back with runbooks you can read without a decoder ring.
  5. Monitoring & observability knowing before they do The first person to know something is wrong is you - not a customer, and not a headline.
§ 02

A dispatch from the workshop

Featured work
Wegweiser

Most MSPs own more tooling than they can wield. Wegweiser is the intelligence layer that sits quietly over the top of it.

It ingests telemetry from Windows, Linux and macOS agents, produces hierarchical health scores from the individual device up to the tenant, and exposes a context-aware AI chat at every level of that hierarchy. In one stroke, it takes on the two hardest problems an MSP has: the onboarding-discovery problem and the institutional-knowledge problem.

No rip-and-replace. Agnostic agents (OSQuery + NATS) that ride on whatever RMM you already run. Multi-tenant SaaS, Azure AD SSO, MFA - the grown-up stuff, built in from day one.

Open the case study ↗

Also built, and running

Wegweiser is the workshop's own, which makes it the easy case. These belong to other people - the harder test, because they have to keep working on the mornings nobody here is looking at them.

  • Strategic Science Solutions Website, hosting and mail, on infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Suffolk · 2026 · running
  • Ouchul Hwang A painter's portfolio, built to put the canvases first and then stay out of their way. Artist · 2026 · running
  • Nourish Your Business Workplace nutritional therapy, with content management so the copy changes without a developer. Suffolk · 2026 · running
  • Strategy Strolls Website and brand assets for an outdoor networking venture. Suffolk · 2026 · running

The workshop's own products - Whirlcrypt, Felgate, Felinar, Mantrinol and the rest - are listed in the catalogue below.

§ 03

Also issued from the workshop

A running index
of things made

  1. AI Agents for Everyone A field manual for product managers

    A British, direct guide to making credible decisions about agentic AI - model tiers, pricing, MCP, safety, ROI - without drowning in transformer maths. Kindle eBook, £9.99. AI Agents - book updates →

    Just published

  2. Whirlcrypt Zero-knowledge file sharing

    Privacy-first file exchange. Browser-side RFC 8188 encryption, no accounts, no telemetry, automatic expiry, pluggable storage. Open source (MIT).

    Live

  3. Felgate Practice portal for nutritional therapists

    An affordable practice portal for nutritional-therapy and functional-health practitioners in their early years. Each practice gets its own branded space for clients and questionnaires, food diaries and clinical notes, protocols, bookings, secure messaging and invoicing, gathered into one calm place. Priced for the people the big vendors tend to look past.

    Live

  4. Fenrir Multi-tenant vulnerability scanning

    OWASP ZAP wrapped in OSINT enrichment and AI-analysed findings. Built for consultants and MSPs running scans across many tenants, with billing, MFA and deduplication baked in.

    Live

  5. SQL Diagnostic Tool Portable SQL Server health analysis

    Glenn Berry's 80+ industry-standard queries bundled into a single portable binary. Auto-detects SQL Server 2005-2025 and offers optional AI recommendations via OpenAI or Ollama.

    Live

  6. Lyra AI prompt optimisation system

    A 4-D prompt-engineering framework - Deconstruct, Diagnose, Develop, Deliver - for reliably precision-engineering prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Open source.

    Live

  7. Felinar Voice companion for living with dementia

    A voice companion for elderly people living with dementia. You talk, it talks back, and there is nothing else to learn - it remembers across days, redirects gently when a memory slips, and keeps company through the flat hours. Multilingual by design; the alpha speaks Romanian, backed by an ElevenLabs Startup Grant.

    In alpha

  8. Trimbitas Internet radio for Android

    An internet radio player built to replace XiiaLive Pro, which was abandoned by its developer. Tens of thousands of stations from the Radio Browser directory, a real sleep timer, and playback that survives a station server behaving badly on a train. Kotlin and Compose, no accounts, no telemetry, and it works with every runtime permission denied.

    In closed testing

  9. Mantrinol Cross-platform backup

    Restic, wrapped in a modern web UI and a visual scheduler, installed as a native service on Windows, macOS and Linux. SMB, NFS and cloud backends out of the box.

    In development

  10. DocuVault IT documentation & asset management

    A centralised knowledge hub for MSPs: organisations, devices, secrets, certificates and runbooks. First-class MeshCentral integration. Self-hostable, open source.

    Early access

  11. Planetophone A game of speaking with sentient planets

    A peaceful, slow trading game set in 2676, where every planet is an eldritch being with a soul and the only way to trade is to speak with it. The Planetophone is the device you tune to find a planet whose voice suits you, then build a relationship with over time. A relationship simulator dressed as a space-trading game.

    In development

  12. DeCLAI Decentralised compute for LLM inference

    A published research paper (DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.21788.19848) proposing a non-monetary credit model - one GPU-hour given, one GPU-hour earned - to widen access to large-model inference.

    Paper

The full catalogue, with permalinks

§ 04

The proprietor

A profile in
twenty years
Andrei Trimbitas, founder of Old Forge Technologies.
Andrei Trimbitas, MSc. Plate IV.

Twenty years ago, Andrei Trimbitas was running the internet loyalty platform for DHL in Germany. He has since worked at Microsoft, led the EMEA rollout of Kaseya's flagship RMM product, served on the Kaseya Security Council, and travelled to Auckland and Dublin to train support teams that went on to close forty per cent more cases. In 2019 he moved to a village in Suffolk and set up a workshop, and in 2020 he named it Old Forge Technologies.

He holds an MSc in Computer Science with a specialism in Cybersecurity, and has published research on decentralised compute for large language models. He speaks English, German and Romanian natively. The work he's doing now - small clients, serious software, no middle-men - is, he is the first to admit, probably the work he should have been doing all along.

I'm not here to sell the latest trend. I'm here to build the thing that actually works.

When he isn't in the workshop, he is a dad to a son and a daughter who, between them, have given him a very clear understanding of what "can't wait, it needs to work now" really means.

Experience
20+ years in technology DHL · Microsoft · Kaseya
Education
MSc Computer Science Cybersecurity specialism
Languages
English · German · Romanian
Research
DeCLAI DOI 10.13140/RG.2.2.21788.19848
Council
Member, Kaseya Security Council
At home
Kennett, Suffolk Father of two

Accreditations

Recognised, accredited, noted.

Cyber Essentials
Certified Made in Britain
Accredited Member Best Managed UK
IT · 2025
Best Managed UK
IT · 2024
Best Managed UK
IT · 2023
MSP Alliance
Member
IONOS
Eco Partner
§ 05

Notes from the workshop

The Journal
latest writing
Cybersecurity· 14 September 2026 · 1 min read

I reported a phish. I found a casino.

A phisher impersonating IONOS, a registrar form that only accepts JPGs as evidence, a confirmation page that promises silence, and a dead security watchdog reborn as a Bulgarian casino site. This is what reporting abuse looks like, end to end.

Read entry
Cybersecurity· 28 August 2026 · 2 min read

A better password is still a password

OPAQUE lets a server authenticate you without ever seeing your password, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of cryptography. I spent an evening working out whether to put it into Wegweiser, and then worked out why I should not. Here is the reasoning, including the more interesting question underneath it: could you encrypt a customer database with the same trick?

Read entry
AI· 15 August 2026 · 2 min read

The machine has a house style

A client recommended a tool, I went to look at the company that makes it, and found my own website. Nobody copied anybody. We had both asked a machine for something distinctive and been handed the same thing. Here are the measurements, and what actually fixes it.

Read entry
Read the full Journal
§ 06

How this page works

Seven things
you can check

Everything above this line is a claim. This is the part you can verify without taking my word for it, because it is all running on the page you are reading.

  1. I.

    The assistant in the corner

    It answers from what it has been told about the workshop, searches the Journal through the database's own full-text index, reads the actual calendar and writes real bookings into it. Ask when I am free and it is reading the diary, not improvising.

    No vector database to run · no per-seat chatbot subscription · UK-hosted, with only the model itself in Frankfurt

  2. II.

    A status page that is actually watching

    /status is live monitoring with twenty-four hours of history behind every bar, not a screenshot of a dashboard. When something here breaks it says so before anyone has to ask.

    Open-source tooling · no licence · published rather than kept private

  3. III.

    The stamp at the bottom of this page

    That short string in the footer is the exact commit this server is running. Push a change and it is live in about a minute - no deploy button, no pipeline to watch, and no way for the site to quietly disagree with the code.

    Two lines of systemd · nothing to log into

  4. IV.

    Book a call and the room is mine too

    The booking form hands back a meeting room on this domain, and the call is transcribed by a model running on the same machine that serves this page. No Zoom account to make, no Teams licence, and the audio never leaves the building.

    Self-hosted · nothing recorded · no third party in the room

  5. V.

    Nothing here phones home

    No analytics, no tag manager, no tracking pixel, no consent banner to dismiss because there is nothing to consent to. Even the typefaces you are reading are served from this machine rather than from Google's.

    Zero third-party requests on this page · check the network tab

  6. VI.

    Turn your connection off

    A service worker keeps this page the first time you read it, so in flight mode it opens again - the page itself, not a husk of it. Ask for something the browser has never seen and you get a page of ours saying the wires are down, instead of the browser's own error.

    Nothing to install · works on a train

  7. VII.

    All of it written by hand

    Hand-written HTML, CSS and PHP. No framework, no bundler, no build step - which means there is nothing here that stops working because a toolchain moved on without asking.

    Still running in ten years · readable by whoever comes next

The masthead claims Vol. VII · Ed. 17. That edition number is counted off the Journal, so it cannot claim more issues than have actually been written - which is, in miniature, the whole idea. A page is an odd thing to offer as a portfolio, but all of the above is running on the one you are reading, and that is a more honest sample than a case study I could write about myself.

§ 07  ·  Correspondence

Write to Old Forge.

Commissions, questions, second opinions - all welcome. I read every one myself, and replies usually arrive within two working hours.

Add a phone number, a company, or a topic