Active
MVM
A strict, cross-platform microVM runtime for safely executing AI agents and untrusted workloads.
Founder · Technologist · Systems Builder
I build technical companies, technical leverage, and technical trust.
I’m Ari Lerner. I work where systems software, AI infrastructure, security, and product meet—turning difficult technical ideas into things people can actually use.
Currently building secure execution infrastructure for AI agents. What I’m doing now
Selected systems
Building below the interface
Runtime boundaries, content-addressed systems, and infrastructure that makes powerful software safer and simpler to operate.
Research
Hologram
An object-first runtime exploring deterministic execution, portable artifacts, zero-copy data paths, and compute that travels with its guarantees.
Research
UOR
Research into semantic, content-addressed object identity and a topology where software can address meaning rather than storage location.
Working thesis
Power is useful when its boundaries are legible
The systems I care about make capability explicit, complexity containable, and trust inspectable.
01
Compute should be containable
Powerful workloads need hard machine boundaries, attenuated authority, and a blast radius the operator can understand.
02
Interfaces should hide the right complexity
The best infrastructure does not expose every mechanism. It exposes the guarantees people need to build with confidence.
03
Trust should be verifiable
Policy, identity, provenance, and auditability should travel with the system—not live in an operator’s memory.
Writing
Notes from the work
Essays about secure AI systems, Rust, infrastructure, learning, and the human reasons we build.
How to Build Around an Open Theorem Without Claiming It
The repository kept getting greener while the central theorem remained open. We needed the software itself to preserve that distinction.
A Registry Is a Graph, Not a Bucket
The first useful API fit on two lines. It stopped being enough as soon as one release needed names, dependencies, signatures, and an atomic moment of publication.
A Program Should Be Able to Resume Somewhere Else
A snapshot felt portable until I asked a second machine to understand it. Moving execution requires more than copied memory pages.
The long arc
Builder, teacher, operator.
I’ve built companies and systems, authored and co-authored nine technical books, taught engineers around the world, worked inside AWS innovation, and kept returning to the same question: how do we make powerful technology usable without making it careless?
The longer story- 9
- technical books authored or co-authored
- 3×
- Stripe capture-the-flag competitions
- ∞
- curiosity for systems from hardware to semantics
Open channel
Working on something technically ambitious?
I’m always interested in hard systems problems, serious open-source work, and people building new leverage without ignoring trust.