Ballast

An independent AI product studio · India

AI you can trust in production — because something solid sits under it.

Ballast builds and ships products where the AI is the interface and the engineering is the promise. Language on the surface, deterministic rules and guardrails below the line — so it holds up when real users show up.

See what we've shipped ↓ Work with us
FIG · THE WATERLINE free text voice chat · hinglish LANGUAGE — fluid, human, LLM DETERMINISTIC BALLAST rules state limits audit the weight that keeps the product stable
01

Products

EACH ONE LIVES ON ITS OWN SUBDOMAIN
Live · public beta

FITNESS · B2B2C

Arc

A fitness journal that coaches you back. Log meals and workouts in plain text — English or Hinglish — and Arc turns it into structured tracking, an adaptive daily plan, and honest weekly feedback. Trainers layer on top: AI drafts, the trainer approves.

arc.rishabhshukla.dev →
  • › One text box — Hinglish parsing, nothing to learn
  • › Deterministic progression & fatigue signals
  • › Grounded Indian-food macros
  • › Trainer console with approval gate
STACK · FastAPI · Cloud Run · Supabase · Expo · Claude
In beta

DEVELOPER TOOLING

Product Two

Placeholder. Drop your next product here — a one-line what-it-is, who it's for, and the subdomain it ships on. Keep the same shape as Arc so the lineup reads as a real studio pipeline.

two.rishabhshukla.dev →
  • › Key capability one
  • › Key capability two
  • › Key capability three
STACK · edit me
In the lab

EXPLORATION

Next up

Placeholder. A studio always has something on the bench. Tease the direction here without over-promising — “in the lab” signals momentum and a real pipeline to anyone reading, including future hires or partners.

Subdomain reserved
  • › What problem it explores
  • › Why now
  • › Who it's for
STACK · TBD
02

How we build

THE STUDIO'S POINT OF VIEW

LLMs on top, rules underneath

The model handles language. Anything a user must trust — progression, pricing, limits, safety — is deterministic code. That split is the ballast.

Humans keep final say

AI drafts; a person approves. Approval gates, consent, and revocation are first-class in the schema — not bolted on after a demo.

Ship, then let reality decide

We put products in front of real users early, with clear success and kill criteria, and let the market — not our own optimism — set the next move.

Built for India first

Hinglish input, INR pricing, and domain grounding for local realities that Western-first tools handle poorly. The details incumbents skip are the wedge.

03

Founder

ONE BUILDER, SHIPPING

Rishabh Shukla

Founder · AI systems engineer & architect

Senior AI Lead building production agentic systems by day — multi-tenant agent platforms, retrieval infrastructure, and AI-assisted analytics. Ballast is where I take those patterns and ship whole products under one point of view: the AI should be delightful to talk to and boring to depend on.

Deep interest in the parts most people skip — deterministic guardrails, human-in-the-loop design, privacy-first retrieval, and making all of it work for Indian users first.

LinkedIn → GitHub → Email →

Have a product that has to work in the real world?

Email[rishabhs8299@gmail.com] LinkedIn/in/rishabh GitHub@rishabhshukla10