Kaizen Forge

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 cut AI costs 10× 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.

Ready to cut the hype?

A free 30-minute assessment. You'll leave knowing where AI generates return in your company, decide based on engineering, not on fear of falling behind.

Book a free assessment