Dr Alexander Mikhalev

United Kingdom · Systems thinker · Founder of Terraphim & Applied Knowledge Systems

Building privacy-preserving AI that works for the user — and the agent tooling that ships it.

Local-First AI · Knowledge Graphs · Agentic Engineering · Digital Twins · Systems Engineering · Rust

Terraphim · Open Source · Writing · Recognition · Connect · Background

Terraphim is a privacy-preserving AI assistant: a local-first knowledge graph search engine built in Rust and WebAssembly. Sub-millisecond Aho-Corasick pattern matching over role-based knowledge graphs — on your hardware, with zero telemetry, no account, and no cloud dependency. Ships as CLI, desktop app, HTTP server, MCP server, and browser extension, with native hooks for AI coding assistants.

Website · Docs · Origin Story · Forum

Local-first knowledge graph search engine in Rust and WebAssembly: sub-millisecond Aho-Corasick matching over role-based knowledge graphs, zero telemetry, no account. Ships as CLI, Tauri desktop app, HTTP server, MCP server, and WASM browser extension — 52+ workspace crates.

The harness, not the model, determines agent success — +26% benchmark gain (52.8 → 66.5% on Terminal Bench 2.0) with zero model changes. Context architecture, execution guardrails, and memory infrastructure that actually works. Organisation: reference-architecture-ai (site source) · Medium publication.

Gitea fork extended for the agent economy: PageRank-powered issue triage, dependency graphs, native MCP server, and scoped robot accounts with full audit trails. Upstream-compatible — runs our fleet at git.terraphim.cloud.

57 curated, battle-tested, cryptographically signed skills for Claude Code, Codex, and other agent CLIs — disciplined engineering, Rust performance, DevOps, orchestration. One-command verified install: cargo install terraphim-skills → tsm install <skill>.

Pay-first SaaS that hands each customer their own Gitea-on-Firecracker microVM within ~30 seconds of checkout — container, npm, and Cargo registries included. Public demo (resets daily): demo.terraphim-forge.com.

The Declarative Data Generator: realistic, constraint-based synthetic data from schema-as-code — database agnostic, scales to millions of rows, version-controlled and peer-reviewable like any other code. Fork carrying the getsynth/synth lineage (★1.4k upstream) forward. Companion content: synth-data-engineering.

Plus the entire Terraphim organisation — 66 public repositories, 52+ Rust workspace crates.

• metacortex.engineer — long-form engineering notes
• Terraphim origin story — from The Pattern (Redis Hackathon Platinum winner) through Kaggle and Oxford to Terraphim AI
• INCOSE EMEA webinar — semantic search over the systems engineering body of knowledge

• Platinum winner, Redis "Build on Redis" Hackathon 2021 — real-time NLP for medical literature (The Pattern)
• Innovate UK funded — talent digital shadow, project "ATOMIC" (TSB Project No: 600594)
• Digital twin programmes for Boeing and Rolls-Royce aircraft networks
• Speaker, INCOSE EMEA — semantic search and systems engineering

• Founder, Applied Knowledge Systems Ltd — applied AI, digital twins, sensor fusion
• AI lead architect at Nationwide; CTO & Head of AI at Zestic AI — taking innovation from idea to production (metacortex.engineer)
• The Pattern — Redis Hackathon Platinum Winner: outperformed Nvidia's ML pipeline for BERT QA inference on CPU; results presented at a public lecture at Oxford University, Green Templeton College (origin story)
• Methodology validated in the INCOSE community for the Systems Engineering Handbook v.4 — a recognised low-effort substitution for formal model-based systems engineering
• Systems engineering: operational digital twins of aircraft networks for Boeing and Rolls-Royce
• IoT sensor fusion: LiDAR and acoustic-based water-flow monitoring
• Building with knowledge graphs since the CORD-19 era; local-first AI full-time since 2022
• The name Terraphim comes from the Relict series of science fiction novels by Vasiliy Golovachev — an artificial intelligence living inside a spacesuit (part of an exocortex), designed to help you with your tasks