About Us
Who We Are
Distributed Thinking Systems builds local-first AI, secure automation, and developer tooling for work where privacy and technical control matter.
The focus is practical: keep sensitive data close, reduce accidental secrets exposure, and make AI useful without pushing every document, token, or workflow into a cloud service by default.
What Guides the Work
- Local-first AI: run models, agents, and data processing as close to the user as possible.
- Privacy-focused systems: design workflows around sensitive documents, credentials, logs, and case material.
- Secure automation: build tools that avoid leaking secrets into
.envfiles, shell history, command arguments, or startup configs. - Developer infrastructure: use Unix, macOS, and Linux systems engineering to make local workflows reliable.
Sensitive Workflows
One important vertical is legal, counseling, and family-law analysis involving sensitive communications and documents. Within that work, parental alienation case analysis remains a specialized focus.
The broader pattern is the same across projects: sensitive workflows need useful tooling, but they also need restraint about where data goes and how secrets are handled.
Founder & Expertise
Distributed Thinking Systems was founded by Michael Sullivan, with over 30 years of experience in computing, distributed systems, Unix/Linux environments, automation, and applied AI tooling.
How to Work Together
- Consulting and implementation: local AI setup, secure automation, systems engineering, and developer infrastructure.
- Project collaboration: open-source tools, applied AI experiments, and privacy-focused workflows.
- Family-law research: case-analysis work, data contribution, and professional collaboration around parental alienation.
Get in touch or review the professional services overview for the kinds of work that fit best.
For questions about the company, confidentiality, and working together, see the Frequently Asked Questions.