About
I'm Carlton Aikins, a software engineer and a Computer Engineering student at the University of Southern California. I build products across mobile and web — mostly iOS and Flutter apps, Next.js front ends, and the AI plumbing behind them.
I started building at 14, right before COVID, and shipped my first mobile app — Elisha, an offline Bible and church app — to the App Store and Play Store at 15. Everything since has been a variation on that: pick something people actually need, ship it, and keep shipping until it's good.
What I am working on
I'm building Stora, an AI-powered App Store and Play Store submission platform. App submission is the least fun part of shipping a mobile app — metadata, screenshots, review guidelines, rejections that arrive three days later — and most of it is mechanical enough that an agent can do it.
Alongside Stora I keep a handful of smaller projects alive: Plynn, a free on-device dictation app for the Mac that never sends audio to a server; Versed, a spaced-repetition iOS app for memorizing Bible verses; and Mobile Use, an experiment in driving mobile devices with natural language.
Where I have worked
Most recently I was a Member of Technical Staff intern at Vercel on the AI Gateway team, where I implemented streaming transcription models and worked on the coding agent CLI. Before that I was a founding engineer at Doublespeed, building AI-powered short-form video editing tools, and Head of Engineering at Liaise, where I led a small team building a professional network for creators.
I interned at Google twice: on the Maps team in 2025 building internal tools, and on the Privacy Sandbox team in 2024 working on browser fingerprint spoofing.
Outside of work I'm an 8VC Engineering Fellow and a Notable Capital AI Fellow, the Region VI Telecommunications Chair for NSBE, and a member of ColorStack and Blockchain at USC. I spent two years at LavaLab, USC's product incubator, first as a developer and then as a mentor.
What I care about
I'm driven by a desire to build products that help people live better lives and learn more about the world.
In practice I bias toward software that is fast, works offline where it can, keeps your data on your device where it can, and does not ask for more attention than it earns. That is why Plynn does its speech recognition entirely on your Mac, and why Versed syncs through your own iCloud rather than a server I control.
I write about engineering, product, and distribution — usually the unglamorous parts, like how to structure a Flutter project, or how to get anyone to notice a side project you just shipped.