Hello, Fellow Tech Enthusiasts! 
Right on time to bring you the latest from Ralabs and the tech industry.
📊 Focus & Insights
- October has been a month of preparation and reflection. We’ve started shaping next year’s strategy, reviewing market trends, consulting with partners, and refining priorities ahead of November’s strategic session.
- We built an AI agent to support contract reviews. It’s called Amigo Nestor Agent, and it performs a pre-human check of incoming client contracts. When a new contract arrives, the agent reviews each document, compares it against our 50+ internal legal criteria, and flags missing or critical points. Once all issues are resolved with the clients, the legal team does a final review and we proceed with signing. It was built in one month using n8n, OpenAI/OpenRouter, and Google Sheets, with Slack integration to keep everything streamlined. If you’d like to learn more or build something similar for your team, feel free to reach out here or via my LinkedIn.
- Roman Rodomansky, Ralabs’ co-founder, recently attended the VDS conference in Valencia. He made excellent connections and shared some insightful observations. A key takeaway: 100% of the product startups at the conference are using AI to some degree, and half of them have AI as their core product. However, it’s disappointing that many startups are using AI mainly as a marketing tool, trying to attract investment without genuine technological innovation. The technical implementation is often weak.
On a more positive note, there’s a lot of curiosity in the air. Companies are learning and experimenting, and that’s how we move forward. Starting a new project without AI now seems illogical: investors and the market will question why AI isn’t integrated. As AI continues to evolve, its absence will raise doubts about market readiness.
- Roman will be a speaker at WawTech in Warsaw, December 2025. He’ll discuss how we’re using AI at Ralabs to measure quality in some of our ongoing projects. If you’re in Warsaw during the conference, it’s a great opportunity for an in-depth conversation on AI and quality measurement in tech. Reach out if you’d like to connect.
👩🏼💼 HR Updates
- We welcomed 10 new teammates this month. This brings our total headcount to 139 colleagues, across engineering, design, HR, and delivery roles.
- The Business Acumen Learning & Development Program wrapped up this month. This six-month program focused on proactivity, negotiation skills, and effective client communication. I’m particularly proud of this initiative: it teaches our tech leads to think beyond the code. They now grasp the broader business context and understand how their work impacts our clients’ goals. This deeper understanding proved to lead to more informed decisions and better outcomes for our clients.
📈 Business Development
- ETL development continues to gain demand. It’s a growing area for us, and you can learn more about our approach here.
- At Ralabs, we are a Ukrainian company at our core, and while we are hiring talent from around the world, the majority of our developers still come from Ukraine. There’s a reason for that: Hire Software Developers in Ukraine: Your Guide to Building a World-Class Tech Team.
- Project managers are not just “ticket takers” at Ralabs – Beyond the Backlog: How PMs Became Strategic Partners.
- In October, we hosted a great webinar on AI adoption in everyday workflows. Barry Price and Daniel Niiaziiev led a really insightful discussion about the real challenges of using AI—how it’s often misunderstood and not always used the right way. AI isn’t just about giving prompts to ChatGPT and getting answers back. It’s about thoughtfully integrating AI tools into your workflow to get the most out of them. If you didn’t get a chance to attend, catch the full recording.
💻 Coding Insights
- Cursor 2.0 has been released. It’s an excellent combination of a good git client and ChatGPT.
- Locally AI: you can now run models like Llama, Gemma, and DeepSeek directly on your iPhone or iPad, offline and privately.
- Tangled: if GitHub met Bluesky: A social-enabled git collaboration platform built on atproto.
- AgentMail: a tool for building AI agents that send, receive, and parse emails.
- nuqs: helps manage state in URL search parameters, like useState.
- Helium Browser: a clean, open-source browser with ad-blocking by default. Focused on simplicity and speed.
- pg_lake: integrates Iceberg and data lake files into Postgres, transforming it into a standalone lakehouse system.
- LaunchOS Launchpad is back! It’s a bit old school, but it has its fans. Now available for macOS 26.
- I’ve shared my favorite AI tools for my everyday workflows on Linkedin:
🤖 AI Developments
- Apple and Google are collaborating on a massive AI model for Siri. This 1.2 trillion-parameter AI model will be powered by Google’s Gemini model. It’s a significant move towards improving Siri’s performance and ensuring user data security with Apple’s private cloud infrastructure.
- ChatGPT Atlas is a fascinating reminder that AI agents are similar to assistive technologies, benefiting from similar affordances.
- By 2025, AI has become an essential tool in software engineering. AI adoption is no longer optional; it’s a baseline expectation for engineers. We expect every engineer at Ralabs, even at entry-level, to use AI tools purposefully in their daily work.
- NVIDIA and South Korea align on sovereign AI at APEC CEO Summit. The collaboration includes building massive AI data centers and factories, focusing on automotive, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
📚 Books and Reading
- No new books from me this month – a packed schedule with travel and work. Feel free to send over your recommendations.
💡 Thoughts
- Am I the only one who feels the growing AI pessimism?
AI is evolving at a blistering pace: new agents, new toolchains, fresh models every day. And yet, rather than the excitement that once followed these breakthroughs, I sense a growing unease. Within our company, among clients, at webinars, and across my LinkedIn feed, I’ve noticed it too often. A disconnect between us and the technology. It’s as if AI is speeding ahead, while we’re left scrambling to catch up, unsure of its full impact.
This is not just a feeling I’ve had in isolation. The wider industry is grappling with the same concern. Take the insights shared in Andrej Karpathy’s recent conversation on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast or the news from Meta’s AI division, as highlighted in The Verge article. The pace of progress, once a marker of optimism, now feels more like a source of apprehension. There’s a growing awareness that we’ve made huge strides, but we’ve also bypassed the necessary steps in understanding what it all means. What does it mean for jobs, for control, for the future of work itself?
As I think about this, I believe it’s not a problem AI can solve on its own. We need to take a step back, recalibrate, and make sure we’re not just adopting AI for the sake of adoption, but building it in ways that make sense for human progress. The truth is, AI is outpacing our understanding, and that’s where the skepticism begins. As we move forward, it’s vital to address this gap, or we risk falling further behind.
What do you think? I’d love to deepen this conversation and hear your thoughts.
💼 Open Positions at Ralabs
- Middle FullStack Developer
- Backend Engineer
- Middle React Native Engineer
- Middle QA Engineer
- Middle AI Engineer
- Head of Engineering
- Middle/Senior Vue.js Engineer
- QA/AQA JavaScript Specialist
- Node.js/MongoDB Engineer
- Middle Angular Engineer
- Senior Graphic Designer
- Senior Project Manager
- Senior Python Engineer
🔍 Other Noteworthy Mentions
- Deloitte’s AI mistake: a recent case shows the importance of reviewing AI-generated results. Deloitte used AI for a report and had to return $440,000.
- Do we need code reviews? This article challenges the norm in software engineering and is definitely worth considering.
- This post was usefully proofread by ChatGPT, which found several issues that the human proofreaders had not…
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents.
- The healthcare sector is drowning in data but struggling with privacy, interoperability, and AI adoption. Read more on why every healthcare organization needs a smarter data strategy from Ralabs.
- Folder Quick Look: A free Mac tool that solves an age-old issue.
If you found this update helpful, feel free to share it with others. My newsletter is also published as a blog on our website – Ralabs Blog. You can now read the previous updates there.
Lastly, as a company with deep Ukrainian roots, we continue to seek your support for Ukraine during these challenging times. Every contribution makes a difference.
