About
The forge and the smith
“A thousand days of training to develop, ten thousand days of training to polish.”
Miyamoto Musashi
I'm Kayo Souza (Kinho), a tech lead and software engineer with 8+ years building production systems. From Vitória, Brazil, I've worked for Nike (GenAI systems for 16M+ marketing assets), QuintoAndar (logistics efficiency at scale), Loft and Yooga, where I lead the payments team that has processed over US$ 55 million.
Today I'm the tech lead of a US telehealth vertical, putting AI agents into production in a HIPAA environment, where I significantly cut AI costs by applying kaizen: metrics, caching, prompt engineering and continuous improvement. That intensity of use puts me in the top 0.01% of Claude users worldwide.
Kaizen Forge was born to bring that standard to more companies. Kaizen (改善) is continuous improvement; a forge is where iron becomes blade under pressure and heat. That's how I treat software and AI: no hype, made to measure, measured.
I write about engineering and AI at kinho.dev.
Where the standard was forged
- Nike
- QuintoAndar
- Loft
- Yooga
- Healthtech (US)
Principles
Honesty over polish
A number that wasn't measured doesn't go on the site. A scope that doesn't close doesn't get promised.
Production or nothing
Demos don't pay bills. Every project ends with a system operating and a team trained.
Kaizen
Metrics-driven continuous improvement. Every system I ship gets better, and cheaper, over time.
The manifesto
Kaizen is not a slogan
Every AI company promises overnight transformation. We don't. Kaizen (改善) is continuous improvement: small, measured, compounding. A system a little better every week beats a revolution that never leaves the slide deck.
We forge it in this order, every time: diagnose with honesty, cut what doesn't pay for the project, ship to production with metrics from day one, and keep polishing. It's not a magic formula. It's discipline, applied again and again.
If you want a nice case study for a pitch deck, we're not for you. If you want a system that runs, with numbers to prove it, that's exactly what Kaizen Forge exists for.
Cut the hype. Measure what matters. Repeat.
Ready to cut the hype?
A free 30-minute assessment. You'll leave knowing where engineering generates return in your company, decide based on evidence, not opinion.