While the industry chases agent reliability through smarter models, most agent failures trace to one design choice: letting the model decide what happens next. I built a software factory where the model only writes the code, while a deterministic controller drives Claude Code and Codex workers through the entire workflow, grounded by executable gates and engineering directives, with every transition, retry budget, and terminal owned by a versioned graph. I'll show the architecture, the failure classes it eliminates by construction, and what adversarial battle-testing taught me about where agent autonomy actually breaks.
Marcelo is CEO and Founder of Kidar, an AI agency serving capital allocators to turn frontier AI into safe to run, governed AI operating systems targeting increased competitiveness and maximal ROI. Prior to that, Marcelo co-founded and was CEO of Viridios AI, an AI platform that created a transparent, unified knowledge base from the complex real-world domain of climate markets. This platform was key to unlocking value in an opaque international commodity market, a journey that involved Series A/B raises and culminated in a successful acquisition by Bloomberg in 2024. Marcelo is also deeply involved in the venture investing ecosystem in the US, as a VC Partner at Advantary Capital Partners, a Mentor at C10 Labs and an advisor of early stage startups. He is also a Member of the Advanced Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), where he explores topics in state-of-the-art Generative AI as an AI researcher. His career developed in the financial industry with roles at Morgan Stanley, Standard Bank, OCBC Bank and ING Bank in London, Singapore, and New York. He has also held academic positions, teaching Masters-level courses in machine learning and carbon finance at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and London Business School (LBS), respectively. Marcelo holds a PhD in Mathematical Finance from Imperial College London and a Master's in Finance from London Business School, bringing a powerful blend of engineering rigor and financial acumen to his work.
