Paid for what we know, not what we type.

The founder

heka is Eric Polerecky's firm. Eric has worked as an independent consultant since 1999: 27 years of shipping software as a principal engineer and fractional CTO, for startups, established companies and government. He has built and led engineering teams, and shipped systems that had to stay up.

For most of that time the job was the same in one respect: clients paid for engineers because writing software was expensive. That stopped being true. Agents write the code now, and they write a lot of it.

The shift

What did not change is everything that made software hard in the first place. Someone still has to decide what to build, lay out the system so it can change, check that the change works, keep secrets secret, and keep production up. With agents, all of that has to happen at a volume no team of people could review by hand.

So the work moved. We build the system around the agents: the guides they read, the sensors that check them, the access they get, and the infrastructure they ship to. We call it the software factory, and we keep the lights on: every change visible, verified and reversible.

We work in your repositories. You get commits, pull requests and written findings, not slide decks.

Why “heka”

Heka was the ancient Egyptian god of magic. For the Egyptians, heka was not mystery; it was a working force, the power of words spoken correctly to make things happen. A good harness is close to that: plain written instructions that, with the right checks around them, turn into working software.

The company is The Heka Vault, LLC. The vault is also the name of the secrets store we run for our own agents, which is the kind of thing we build for clients.