Hello there!
I'm Luigi, I think a lot about AI-powered tools, and I spend an unreasonable amount of time making AI assistants do what they're supposed to do.
After months of tedious copy-pasting between ChatGPT/Claude and my codebase, I realized the problem wasn't the AI – it was the workflow. So I built Athanor, an AI workbench that makes the whole process actually practical. No more manual file gathering, no more playing "spot the difference" with AI-generated code or text snippets.
What I'm Building
Athanor is my current main side project – that's a thing. It is a desktop app that handles the boring parts of AI-assisted development:
- Intelligently selects relevant files from your project
- Generates proper prompts with actual context
- Shows you exactly what changes the AI wants to make before anything touches your disk
- Works with whatever AI chat you already use (no API keys required)
I'm also working on other tools that solve real frustrations in the AI development space and using AI for research within and outside academia. Each project typically starts from something that annoyed me enough to fix it.
The Context
By day, I lead a machine learning research group. By night (and weekends), when we are not busy with conference deadlines, I build the tools I wish existed for practical AI-assisted development. This started as a way to stay current with AI capabilities and quickly became about making them genuinely useful.
Why Sponsor?
Sponsorships will largely cover expense costs. I'd love one day to be able to cover those sweet premium AI subscriptions, but that's a far stretch. We aim for the moon – but also remember, don't look at the moon.
Your sponsorship helps me justify with myself and my family the time I dedicate to:
- Maintaining and improving Athanor (currently in pre-alpha, so plenty to do)
- Building new open-source AI tools that solve actual problems
- Writing documentation that doesn't require a PhD to understand
- Keeping everything free and open source
If you've ever lost 20 minutes to copy-paste operations that should have taken 2, you know why this matters. Let's make AI-assisted workflows less painful together. Or something.
I can pay for one AI provider monthly subscription!
Featured work
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lacerbi/athanor
⚗️Athanor is the AI workbench where modern alchemists cook
TypeScript 2 -
lacerbi/paper2llm
Convert academic PDFs with figures into text-only Markdown — for humans and LLMs
TypeScript 1