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.