In the Workshop MMXXVI A one-person affair

A small
workshop.
Serious
software.

I build custom software, AI tools and automation for small businesses in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. You deal with one person from the first call to the last fix.

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

I spent twenty years in the industry, mostly inside large companies, and very little of what they buy would suit a business of five people. It costs too much and assumes an IT department that a small firm hasn't got. Old Forge is the workshop I wanted to find and couldn't. Commissions, not subscriptions.

A.T. - Kennett, Suffolk.

§ 01

The work

One trade
and what holds it up

Most of the work

Artificial intelligence that actually does a good job.

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 find one number, and build the smallest thing that removes it. I choose the model by testing several against the real task.

If I look and the answer is that AI won't help, I'll say so. The half hour it takes to find out is free.

  • Document search that finds the thing, across your own material.
  • Support and triage your customers won't mind dealing with.
  • Models run where the data is allowed to be - hosted, or on hardware you own.

From £2,500 for a focused proof of concept. Each job quoted separately, after a conversation.

What this involves →

What it rests on

Useful AI work is mostly ordinary engineering. These are the trades it relies on, and each of them gets booked on its own just as often.

  1. Custom software made to measure Web apps, internal tools and integrations built around how you already work.
  2. Intelligent automation for the dull, repeated jobs The copying and re-typing that eats an afternoon a week, done by a script instead.
  3. Cybersecurity sized for a small firm An MSc in cybersecurity, applied in proportion to what you have to protect. Old Forge holds Cyber Essentials itself, so I know what the assessment asks for.
  4. Cloud infrastructure set up and written down Servers and cloud accounts set up carefully, monitored, and handed over with runbooks written in plain English.
  5. Monitoring & observability so you hear first When something breaks, you hear about it before your customers do.
§ 02

A dispatch from the workshop

Featured work
Wegweiser

Most MSPs pay for more tools than they have time to use. Wegweiser reads what those tools already collect and points at the machines and clients that need attention.

Agents on Windows, Linux and macOS report in, and health is scored at every level from a single device up to the whole tenant. Each level has an AI chat that knows what it is looking at, so you can ask about one laptop or a whole client. It is aimed at the two problems MSPs find hardest: finding out what a new client has got, and holding on to what only one technician knows.

You keep your RMM - the agents (OSQuery and NATS) run alongside it. It is multi-tenant, with Azure AD single sign-on and MFA built in from the start.

Open the case study ↗

Also built, and running

Wegweiser is my own, so it proves less. These belong to clients, and they have to keep working on the days I'm not 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, with the design kept out of the way of the paintings. Artist · 2026 · running
  • Nourish Your Business Workplace nutritional therapy, with a content editor so the text can be changed without calling me. Suffolk · 2026 · running
  • Strategy Strolls Website and brand assets for an outdoor networking venture. Suffolk · 2026 · running

My own products - Whirlcrypt, Felgate, Felinar, Mantrinol and the rest - are in the catalogue below.

§ 03

Also made here

A running index
of things made

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

    A plain-English guide for product managers who have to make decisions about agentic AI - model tiers, pricing, MCP, safety, ROI - without wading through transformer maths. Kindle eBook, £9.99. AI Agents - book updates →

    Just published

  2. Whirlcrypt Zero-knowledge file sharing

    Encrypted file sharing. RFC 8188 encryption in the browser, 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, all in one place, at a price a new practice can manage.

    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 built 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 tightening up prompts for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Open source.

    Live

  7. DocuVault Everything an IT estate needs written down

    Organisations, devices, credentials, domains, certificates, runbooks and checklists in one place, with an audit trail on every field. Devices arrive from MeshCentral and open a remote session in a click; domains and DNS come from the registrar; service health comes from Uptime Kuma. Records can be written by talking to an assistant that has already read what is documented. Self-hosted, MIT licensed.

    In daily use

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

  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.

Small clients, nobody in between. I probably should have been doing this all along.

When he isn't working, he is dad to a son and a daughter, who between them have taught him exactly what "can't wait, it needs to work now" 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

Checked by other people.

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· 19 September 2026 · 2 min read

My five-year-old typed two letters into the television

He was two letters into the name of a programme when the television offered him pornography - second in the list, above Poirot, on a device with children profiles already set up. Fire TV parental controls gate playback and purchases. Nobody pointed them at the search suggestions.

Read entry
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
Read the full Journal
§ 06

How this page works

Seven things
you can check

Everything above this line is a claim. Everything below it is running on the page you are reading, so you can check it yourself.

  1. I.

    The assistant in the corner

    It answers from notes about the business, searches the Journal with the database's own full-text search, and reads and writes my real calendar. If you ask when I'm free, it looks in the diary.

    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 live

    /status shows live monitoring, with twenty-four hours of history behind every bar. If something here breaks, it shows up there before anyone has to tell me.

    Open-source tooling · nothing to license · public

  3. III.

    The stamp at the bottom of this page

    The short code in the footer is the exact commit this server is running. A change goes live about a minute after I push it and the stamp changes with it, so what you see is always what is in the repository.

    Two lines of systemd · nothing to log into

  4. IV.

    Book a call and the room is mine too

    Booking a call gives you a meeting room on this domain, and the transcription runs on the same machine that serves this page. You don't need a Zoom or Teams account, and the audio never leaves that machine.

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

  5. V.

    Nothing here phones home

    There are no analytics, tracking pixels or tag managers here, so nothing on this page needs your consent. Even the fonts come from this server.

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

  6. VI.

    Turn your connection off

    The first time you load this page, a service worker keeps a copy, so it still opens in flight mode. Go to a page you haven't visited before and you get a short note from me saying you're offline, instead of the browser's error.

    Nothing to install · works on a train

  7. VII.

    All of it written by hand

    Plain HTML, CSS and PHP, with no framework and no bundler, so nothing here breaks because a toolchain moved on.

    Should still run in ten years · readable by whoever comes next

The masthead says Vol. VII · Ed. 17. That edition number is counted from the Journal, so it can't claim more issues than I have written. A web page is an odd thing to offer as a portfolio, but this one you can check for yourself.

§ 07  ·  Correspondence

Write to Old Forge.

A job, a question, or a second opinion on a quote you've been given. I read every message myself and usually reply within two working hours.

Add a phone number, a company, or a topic