In the Workshop April, 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, 2024

A note from the proprietor

Twenty years inside the biggest machines of the industry — DHL, Microsoft, Kaseya — taught me something I'm still a little reluctant to say out loud: the smallest businesses were getting the worst end of it. Bloated platforms. Vendor lock-in. AI sold with a confident face by people who'd never shipped a line of production code. Old Forge is my answer to all of that. A workshop, not a software house. Commissions, not subscriptions. Built to fit the hand that'll use it.

A.T. — Kennett, Suffolk.

§ 01

The disciplines of the workshop

Six trades
commissioned
  1. I.

    AI Adoption & Implementation cutting through the hype

    Practical artificial intelligence that earns its place. Document search that actually finds things. Support that doesn't burn your reputation. Models chosen for the job — not the marketing deck.

    See the plate →
  2. II.

    Custom Software Solutions built to fit your hand

    When the off-the-shelf doesn't fit the workflow, we build to measure. Web apps, internal tools, integrations — designed around how your business actually runs, not how the vendor thinks it should.

    See the plate →
  3. III.

    Intelligent Automation hours, returned

    The boring, repeatable work that eats an afternoon — handled. Workflows in n8n and custom code that stitch your tools together and quietly do their job while you get on with something worth doing.

    See the plate →
  4. IV.

    Cybersecurity that doesn't get in the way

    MSc-level cyber, applied with a light hand. Posture reviews, hardening, secrets management, monitoring — the kind of security that fits the scale of the business, not the anxiety of the vendor.

    See the plate →
  5. V.

    Cloud Infrastructure foundations that hold

    Hosting, architecture and uptime for people who'd rather not learn Terraform. Set up properly, watched properly, and handed back with runbooks you can read without a decoder ring.

    See the plate →
  6. VI.

    Monitoring & Observability knowing before they do

    Dashboards, alerts and telemetry so the first person to know something is wrong is you — not a customer, not a board, and not a headline on a Monday morning.

    See the plate →
§ 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 ↗
§ 03

Also issued from the workshop

A running index
of things made

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. Sentinel Local-first research assistant

    A private RAG companion for security analysts. Ingest advisories and notes, query them with source-cited answers, confidence scoring and an evolving knowledge graph. HMGCC Co-Creation Challenge submission.

    Application phase

  9. EVIE AI-augmented event-log analysis

    A modern replacement for the Windows Event Viewer that translates noisy system logs into plain-English explanations and surfaces the patterns worth caring about.

    In development
§ 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 done a stint at Microsoft, led the EMEA rollout of Kaseya's flagship RMM product, sat on the Kaseya Security Council, and flown to Auckland and Dublin to train support teams that went on to close forty per cent more cases. In 2024 he moved to a village in Suffolk, set up a workshop, and 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
Former member, Kaseya Security Council
At home
Kennett, Suffolk Father of two

Imprimatur

Recognised, accredited, noted.

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
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§ 06  ·  Correspondence

Write to Old Forge.

Commissions, questions, second opinions — all welcome. Replies usually arrive within two business hours, often much sooner.

5 + 3 = ?