Delight Labs uses modern AI to dramatically increase the amount of useful software and research that a small team can create. Ideas that used to need large teams, budgets and months of coordination can now be explored by one capable person working with powerful models. This page lists what that has produced so far.
Desktop apps for macOS and Windows, web apps, and tools.
A two-pane file manager in the tradition of Norton Commander, with ideas taken from Finder, Chrome and Sublime Text: tabs in each pane, list and icon views, a preview of the selected file in the opposite pane, and zip, 7z and tar archives browsed like folders. Every action is on the keyboard.
A tabbed scratch-pad editor inspired by Sublime Text, for drafting emails, messages and LLM prompts before pasting them elsewhere. Text lives in tabs instead of files and is restored exactly after a restart.
A stock research dashboard: a watchlist of price charts, screeners for trading and long-term investing, an earnings calendar, per-stock backtests, and AI opinions on a stock from local LLM command-line tools.
One cart and one list of liked items across Amazon, eBay, Chrono24 and Dubizzle, with the delivery promise, landed cost, condition and seller of each item. An Explore view collects YouTube videos, Instagram posts, news and web pages about the brands and products you follow. It reads pages you could read yourself and never buys anything on its own.
Tracks the usage limits of Claude, Codex and Gemini in one place, compares usage with an even use of each window, projects when a limit runs out, and keeps a weekly history.
One place for all your coding-agent chats. A small server on each of your machines connects to the Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI sessions running there, and the Multiplex app (web, macOS, Windows, Android) shows every session from every machine and provider side by side. Read along, reply, and approve commands from anywhere.
A precise statement of PaxosLease and its use for electing a Multi-Paxos leader, formalized in TLA+, model checked with TLC and with its timing arithmetic proved in TLAPS. Checking the original protocol changes three acceptor rules, two of them required for safety.
Under special relativity, "at most one holder at any time" has no frame-independent meaning. The note restates lease safety with light cones and adapts PaxosLease: its containment and quarantine rules each gain the relativistic Doppler factor.
Monte Carlo simulations as a tool for understanding false positive rates, statistical power, variance reduction, early stopping, and the relationship between p-values and Bayesian posterior probabilities.
When treatment nodes are surrounded by control nodes on a social network, part of their boost leaks into control and the measured lift underestimates a full rollout. Simulations on Watts-Strogatz graphs separate seven effects and show how clustering the treatment group reduces the bias.
An explainable simulator of a large company: 19,608 people in five management layers, and eight groups of institutional settings that decide how the company measures, rewards and controls work. Vanity metrics, killed ideas, empire building and the best people leaving all follow from people responding to what they are paid for, and the simulator measures how much value each fix would recover.
In progress. Title pages and contents so far.
The papers on the road to large language models, read in order.
Sixty years of distributed algorithms, from mutual exclusion and logical clocks to Paxos, leases, Byzantine agreement and distributed transactions, each with runnable Python code.
id Software's game engines from Wolfenstein to Doom 3, read from the source code.
Long-form technical posts on distributed systems, data science, A/B testing, physics and AI, most of them with working code.
Academic-style papers from 2007 to today, from spatial indexing of astronomical databases and lattice gauge theory to Paxos and experimentation.
Budapest, 2009 to 2012
Scalien was a NoSQL database startup founded in Budapest in 2009. It built two replicated databases on top of Paxos, ran them in production for a handful of clients, and closed at the end of 2012 when it could not raise venture capital. Both databases are open source.
Scalien's first database, written in 2009: a key-value store with strong consistency, fault tolerance and high availability, replicated with Paxos. The PaxosLease algorithm was designed for its master leases.
The offer letter that started it.
Hi Marton,
I’m delighted to offer you a position as Member of Technical Staff at our organization.
At Delight Labs, our mission is simple: use modern AI to dramatically increase the amount of useful software and research that a small but capable team can create.
We work across three main areas:
Delight Labs is deliberately small. We believe that AI changes the economics of software development and research: ideas that previously required large teams, significant budgets, and months of coordination can increasingly be explored by a small but capable team working with powerful models.
Your role as Member of Technical Staff is therefore unusually broad.
You are expected to identify interesting problems, understand them deeply, build things, run experiments, write code, read papers, develop new ideas, discard bad ones quickly, and occasionally turn good ones into software or research worth publishing. There is no strict separation between researcher, engineer, product manager, designer, and writer. The person who has the idea is generally encouraged to build the first version.
You will have considerable freedom to choose what you work on, guided by three principles:
Tangible output might mean a working tool, a useful automation, an open-source project, an experiment, a paper, a research note, an investment system, or simply a well-documented negative result.
We value curiosity, technical depth, speed, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to actually finish things.
Your compensation package consists primarily of complete ownership of the company, unlimited access to management, an extremely flexible working environment (we have offices in Dubai, Budapest, and along the Adriatic coast), and whatever upside Delight Labs eventually manages to create.
Let’s agree on a start date as soon as possible.
We are excited to have you on board.