Roman Kukhalashvili
From romankukhalashvili.com, the portfolio you are already on
| Born | 2005 (age 20–21), Georgia |
| Nickname | kuxala |
| Education | Business and Technology University (2023–2023) |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, software engineer |
| Employer | Kings International |
| Years active | 2021–present |
| Known for | TraceMe, MilitarySpend, Timmy |
| Languages | Georgian, English |
Roman Kukhalashvili (born 2005) is a Georgian entrepreneur and software engineer at Kings International, an online academic competitions platform.[1][2] He builds software involving automation, artificial intelligence and personal analytics; his projects include MilitarySpend, a defence-spending website maintained largely by scheduled AI agents; TraceMe, a personal computer-activity tracker; and Timmy, an open-source software-development agent.[3][4][5][6]
Kukhalashvili began programming at sixteen, during the COVID-19 pandemic.[7] He later enrolled at Business and Technology University as a business major, but dropped out six months later to pursue entrepreneurship.[3] Shortly after his first startup, Collabifi, failed, he joined Kings International as a software engineer.[8][2] By 2026, building with AI tools, he had come to regard distribution and monetisation, rather than engineering, as his limiting factor.[3]
Early life and education
Childhood
Kukhalashvili grew up in Georgia and became interested in computers during his teens.[1] He wrote his first programs at sixteen, while at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, learning primarily through online resources and projects of his own.[7][3] His first programming language was Python, and one of his first programs turned an old laptop and its webcam into a home-made security camera: it recognised when a person stepped into frame and sounded an alarm.[3]
Education
In 2023 he enrolled at Business and Technology University in Tbilisi to study business management, and dropped out after six months, later describing the experience as a "complete waste of time".[3] He has said his objection was to the format rather than the subjects: commuting, compulsory attendance and coursework he considered less useful than real-world practice.[3] By his account, the entrepreneurship and economics courses were the parts he valued, though he found little use for them in practice.[3] He holds no formal qualification in software.[1]
Business career
First ventures (2021)
His first project, Bored Devi Club, was a non-fungible token collection launched in 2021, when he was sixteen.[7] He has said he spent nights drawing the character components by hand, and used a PHP script to generate one thousand combinations from them.[7] The collection's landing page, written in HTML and CSS, was his first contact with web development.[7] The collection was listed on OpenSea but earned no meaningful revenue.[7]
Learning years (2022–2024)
Most of the public repositories on his GitHub account, registered in March 2021, are learning projects from this period.[9][10]
He studied at Bitcamp, a coding school in Georgia, where he learned React and built several projects.[3] Bitcamp ran online coding olympiads in which students formed teams and built websites from supplied designs; mentors organised each round by hand, creating repositories, assigning students, opening group chats and distributing briefs one at a time.[8] After completing the course he set out to automate that process, which became his first startup, Collabifi.[8][3]
Collabifi (2024–2025)
In October 2024 Kukhalashvili began work on Collabifi, a startup he built and his first attempt at a commercial product.[8] The first version, launched on Product Hunt in November 2024, was a business-to-consumer platform for developers to find collaborators; it attracted no meaningful usage.[8] In December 2024 he pivoted to a business-to-business model aimed at coding schools, approached by cold email.[8]
Some schools expressed interest; none signed.[8] He shut the company down in February 2025 after five months, two pivots and $0 in revenue.[8] He has since described it as the most instructive thing he has done.[8] The project nonetheless led to his first full-time software-development position, at Kings International.[3]
Kings International (2025–present)
Kings International runs online academic olympiads for school students.[2] Kukhalashvili joined in 2025 with little professional experience, and works remotely in a small engineering team across frontend, backend, testing and architecture.[3]
His work there has moved from implementing individual tasks towards building larger features.[3] Among the systems he built is an automated process that runs at weekends and opens pull requests adding test coverage, without anyone starting it.[10]
The job is also where AI-assisted development became central to how he works.[3] He has continued the job while living abroad for several months at a time.[3]
Personal projects (2025–present)
MilitarySpend
MilitarySpend began in August 2025 as a small data-science exercise: Kukhalashvili downloaded SIPRI military-expenditure data and built a simple real-time spending counter on it, which spread on Reddit.[11][3] He kept developing it, and the site now runs to more than 300 pages.[3] By his account it is the project on which he learned most about search and generative-engine optimisation; it reached around 30,000 organic visitors a month.[3]
In February 2026 he added a tracker for the war between the United States and Iran, and its casualty page became the site's most visited, with 36,000 visitors.[11] From March 2026 most of the site has been written and maintained by scheduled agents.[11][4] It has not earned meaningful revenue, and he has since described the niche as commercially weak — the distinction, as he puts it, between building something people visit and something people pay for.[3]
TraceMe
TraceMe, which Kukhalashvili describes as his principal side project, is a productivity tracker that records application and website use automatically and scores focus on a 0–100 scale.[5] It spans a web dashboard, a Tauri desktop application, a Swift menu-bar widget and a Chrome extension, all synchronising through a Python service and a Node backend to a single Postgres database.[5] Three major versions were released between November 2025 and February 2026; the third moved scoring off a hosted language model onto a local algorithm.[5]
Timmy
Timmy is a bot that works as a junior developer: it took development tasks from Discord or a ClickUp board and carried them out through a four-stage pipeline — analysis, implementation, review and correction — opening a pull request at the end.[6]
Other projects
Other projects include ONESTEP, Notion, SkillSmith, ReadBuddy and a number of one-day design experiments.[12]
Working method and views
Artificial intelligence is central to how Kukhalashvili works; he has called it "the best human invention of all time".[3] Since the release of Claude Code in 2025 he has used AI tools every day, in his words for "literally every task", and estimates that around 90% of his programming is now AI-assisted.[3] He nevertheless maintains that "human creativity and problem solving is still the best way to solve problems".[3]
His stated process runs from a written explanation of the problem, to a product requirements document, to a phased implementation plan, to AI-assisted implementation, then testing, review and correction.[3] He holds that code generation has become one of the cheaper parts of software engineering, and that the scarce work is choosing problems, specifying and validating them, and distributing the result.[3]
He also publishes write-ups of self-directed experiments, including ones that returned negative results.[13] The portfolio has been extended into a small collection of sites, including a subdomain of book notes, with plans for an archive that keeps retired projects online after their original domains lapse.[3]
Research interests
His research interest is measuring his own behaviour: attention, habits, physiological response and predictability.[3] TraceMe, which records his computer use, is the only part of this built so far; two single-subject studies have been proposed but not carried out:[5][3]
- Can my smartwatch tell when I'm lying? — whether a model trained only on his own wearable data, recorded during controlled truth and lie trials, can tell the two apart better than chance.[3]
- How predictable am I? — whether a month of recorded behaviour is enough to predict the next day's wake time, location, productivity, spending, exercise and bedtime.[3]
By his own account he intends to move beyond web software into hardware — sensors, wearables and non-invasive brain–computer interfaces — and has described conventional beginner electronics as of little interest to him.[3]
Personal life
Kukhalashvili is based in Georgia but spends much of his time travelling.[3]
His interests include skiing, snowboarding and motorcycles.[3] He has trained in Muay Thai in Thailand.[3]
In June 2026 he spent a month at Network School in Forest City, Malaysia, which he has described as a period in which he felt himself grow, attributing this to the people around him rather than the place.[3]
Athletics
He has competed in two amateur endurance events.[3]
| Date | Event | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 2024 | Half marathon | c. 2:45:00 [3] |
| Jun 2026 | HYROX Forest City, Malaysia | c. 1:12:00 [3] |
Public project ledger
Dates and events are recorded as published; the project names and links are generated from this site's own project data.
| Date | Event | Ref. |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 2021 | Registered a GitHub account. | [9] |
| 2021 | Bored Devi Club launched. One token sold, for $15. | [7] |
| 2022–2024 | Period of public learning repositories; 61 of them remain public and hold one star between them. | [9] |
| Oct 2024 | Collabifi started. | [8] |
| Nov 2024 | Collabifi launched on Product Hunt as a business-to-consumer product. No users arrived. | [8] |
| Dec 2024 | Collabifi pivoted to business-to-business, sold by cold email to coding schools. | [8] |
| Feb 2025 | Collabifi shut down after five months, two pivots and $0 in revenue. | [8] |
| 2025 | Joined Kings International as a full-stack developer, working remotely. | [2] |
| Nov 2025 | TraceMe first version released. | [5] |
| 2025 | Timmy released — a bot that carried out his own assigned development tasks. | [6] |
| Jan 2026 | TraceMe version 2: comparative analytics and a prompt-correction interface. | [5] |
| Feb 2026 | TraceMe version 3: scoring moved off a hosted model onto a local Python algorithm. | [5] |
| 2026 | MilitarySpend running on four scheduled agents; 93,075 all-time page views recorded by August 2026. | [4] |
See also
- List of projects by Roman Kukhalashvili
- Research write-ups, including negative results
References
- "About", romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/#about Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Kings International, organiser of online academic olympiads, kingsolympiad.com. https://kingsolympiad.com/ Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Personal communication with the subject, September 2026. Unpublished; the subject is also the editor of this article.
- MilitarySpend, militaryspend.org; traffic figures from self-hosted Umami analytics, 11 August 2026. https://militaryspend.org/ Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- "TraceMe", project page with version timeline, romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/projects/trace-me Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Timmy, timmy.codes; source at github.com/Forkyapp/Timmy. https://www.timmy.codes/ Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- "Bored Devi Club", project page, romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/projects/devi Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- "Collabifi", project page, romankukhalashvili.com, including the build timeline October 2024 – February 2025 and the archived outreach material. https://romankukhalashvili.com/projects/collabifi Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- GitHub account @kuxala, created 27 March 2021; counts verified by direct API query, 11 August 2026: 61 public and 51 private repositories, 2 followers, 1 star, 3 forks. https://github.com/kuxala Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- Independent competency review of his public and private engineering output, 11 August 2026, held in this repository as an evidence ledger. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
- "MilitarySpend", project page with version timeline and traffic figures, romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/projects/militaryspend Retrieved 24 September 2026.
- Project index, romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/projects Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- Research write-ups, romankukhalashvili.com. https://romankukhalashvili.com/research Retrieved 22 September 2026.
External links
Last edited 24 September 2026.