Keith Lutes
Full-time at TekFive, supporting the VA Office of Connected Care — DevOps, MLOps, observability, and internal tooling. Part-time M.S. in AI & Machine Learning at WGU (done end of 2026).
Off the clock I build multi-agent systems, Claude Skills, and the occasional React Native app for my wife and kids. You'll find most of it on GitHub. I also enjoy playing guitar and being in the mountains with my family.
Work
Open source. Four Skills. Shipped in a few days.
A public repo of four (for now) production Claude Skills. Each one exists because I hit a problem and couldn't find a tool for it.
Each Skill solves a real problem I ran into and couldn’t find a tool for. The four below ship in the repo. Each one has a SKILL.md, an examples folder, and — where it makes sense — real output from its first production run.
Claude Skills · Markdown · Python
CRM analysis and competitive research. Company in, structured brief out.
I used it to research TLDR before I applied.
You give it a company name or URL and an outreach goal. It comes back with recent signals, conversation hooks, and a draft intro line. It’s the kind of thing a sales rep used to need a research intern for.
Log triage for production systems.
On its first real run, it found a 15-day silent failure across 170 cycles that routine monitoring had missed.
I point it at a MERLIN execution log and ask “what happened.” It reads the whole file, cross-references agent state, and surfaces the issues that matter. The 15-day silent cascade was not on my radar until the Skill pulled it up. I built this for my MERLIN project, but the concept can be used on any project logs.
Turns a 3-sentence project idea into a multi-phase task file that Claude Code can execute autonomously.
I used it to bootstrap VIGIL in one overnight session.
Describe the project idea in a couple of sentences. The Skill produces a structured, phased plan — environment setup, core abstractions, critical path, validation — with commit messages, scope boundaries, and explicit stub-vs-implement guidance. Hand the output to Claude Code and watch it go. You can do this in “danger” mode where Claude skips asking permission for things, or in normal mode. I suggest if you go the “danger” route, you set up precautions like a VM or something.
The task file that built this site was generated from a version of this Skill.
Pressure-tests a children's book idea before the author starts drafting.
Built for my wife who writes and illustrates children's books.
Interviews the author about the character, the core conflict, the age fit, and the market, etc. and produces a concept brief the author can use to start drafting — or a clear signal that the idea needs more work.
The “building for non-technical users” story. Most of what I build starts as infrastructure for other engineers. This one didn’t.
193 chapters live. AI-assisted scripture study with expert review.
193 chapters live. AI-assisted scripture study with expert review.
A scripture study tool that surfaces contextual depth and nuance — Hebrew word origins, scholarly precision, thematic threads across books. AI-assisted with human expert review built in (a close friend who holds expertise in Hebrew and Biblical Studies signs off on accuracy). 193 chapters live at sumbible.vercel.app. Built with Astro, deployed on Vercel. A sustained personal project built with craft, not just velocity.
Astro · Claude · Vercel
Production. 30+ days. 24/7.
Co-built with a friend. 8-agent autonomous forex trading system. Blackboard architecture. Runs 24/7.
Eight agents, each with a job:
795 VETOs in 15 days. The Shield does what it’s supposed to.
Graceful LLM fallback: the trading loop never depends on an external service being up. Runs on a Claude Max subscription — no per-token API costs.
Private repo. Happy to discuss in an interview. Co-created with my buddy by phone, then vibe-coded before we employed agents.
Python · Claude · Blackboard architecture · MT5
Private. Parallel to MERLIN.
Crypto variant of MERLIN. Bootstrapped in one overnight Claude Code session using a task-file-generator output.
MERLIN’s philosophy, rebuilt for 24/7 crypto markets. VM-isolated. Runs parallel to MERLIN with no shared state.
The interesting part isn’t the trading system. It’s how it got built: a structured task file handed to Claude Code running in danger mode on a sandboxed VM. The agent ran, committed, pushed, and had a working skeleton by morning. The Skill that wrote the task file is in keith-claude-skills. The Skill’s output bootstrapped its own sibling project. Meta-primitive.
Python · Claude · Binance · Docker
Actively used by 3 non-technical family members.
Household inventory app. Small, but real users — who are not engineers.
React Native app that tracks what’s in the house — pantry, fridge, freezer, garage. Optimized for two things: 1. being fast enough to use while you’re actually shopping, and 2. not requiring anyone to learn anything.
Three real users, 2 of whom are not engineers. Every bug report is a design critique.
React Native · Expo · SQLite
Same-day v1 from a stakeholder conversation.
Same-day v1 from a stakeholder conversation.
A local tire shop manager described the idea; I built v1 that afternoon. AI-generated video walkthrough for the customer explaining recommended services — eliminates the awkward in-person upsell entirely. Real stakeholder, real business problem, working prototype same day. Exploring licensing and productization.
Claude · React · Vercel
Private. Runs on a sandboxed VM.
Discord-driven Claude Code dispatcher. Turns a phone into a remote for autonomous coding sessions.
I DM a project brief or a task file to the bot. It hands it to Claude Code in danger mode on a sandboxed VM. Commits land on GitHub. I watch progress from the couch.
The VM isolation is the part that matters. “Danger mode” without a blast radius is just speed. With a blast radius, it’s an outage waiting to happen. (WIP)
Discord.py · Claude Code · VM isolation
About
I'm a husband, a dad, and a Jesus-following, guitar-playing, karaoke-singing, mountain-exploring, video-game-playing, guy with an "Epic" ginger beard (my kids' words) — in that order on a good week. I've also been told that I'm the type of guy you'd grab a beer with, even though I don't drink.
I live in gorgeous Utah Valley with my wife (who writes and illustrates children's books — one of the Skills above was built for her), and kids old enough and smart enough to check me when I have a weak parenting moment, turn wrenches on the Tacoma with me, tie their own fishing lines, or even pair-program with me when the mood strikes.
Off the clock I get outside and up into the mountains as much as possible. My 2017 Tacoma is a slow-progress overland build that has become a permanent hobby — I keep finishing it, then I keep not finishing it. Saturday mornings right now are school, chores, cartoons, kid cuddles, and/or breakfast. When I can, I camp somewhere remote and watch the sunrise. That's my version of debugging. Mountain Therapy is real and if I knew how to make a sustainable career out of that, I'd shut everything else down.
My personal computer is Linux (Fedora) named TROGDOR2.0. My GitHub handle has been scryptoginger since the crypto-and-Solidity chapter of my life, and the ginger beard that earned me the handle has outlasted the hair on top, which is unfortunate because that was the first thing that caught my wife's eye — my curly ginger locks that sadly have disappeared.
Background
Jan 2025 — present
TekFive
Supporting the VA Office of Connected Care. Currently building internal Claude Skills for AI-hesitant teammates. Building the AI-native playbook one skeptical colleague at a time.
Jan 2023 — Dec 2024
Red Sasquatch Marketing LLC
Full-stack delivery and AI-assisted lead workflows. Participated in the Metana 28-week Solidity/Web3 bootcamp during this stretch.
Apr 2022 — Dec 2022
Kern River Gas Transmission (contract via ConsultNet)
C#/.NET, MSSQL, Azure. Led a legacy logo-update initiative that turned into a full infrastructure audit across 100+ apps.
Apr 2021 — Apr 2022
Applied Systems
Marketing site overhaul and CMS migration (Umbraco → Optimizely). Company MVP within 6 months.
Jan 2017 — Apr 2020
NetDocuments
Promoted from Business Development Manager. Led three iterative website rebuilds as sole developer after inheriting website as Jr Dev. Orchestrated Git and Agile adoption. Earned my B.S. at Troy University (2018) while employed here.
in progress · target EOY 2026
M.S. AI & Machine Learning
Western Governors University
2024
Expert Coding Bootcamp
Metana (Solidity, smart contracts, Web3)
2018
B.S. Applied Computer Science
Troy University
Contact
The fastest way is email: keithlutes@gmail.com.
Code lives at github.com/scryptoginger. Professional history at LinkedIn.