Alex Gavrilescu is Funstage GmbH’s Vienna-based backend and web engineering lead and the creator of Backlog.md, an open-source task-management system for humans and AI coding agents. His software keeps requirements, implementation plans, acceptance criteria, and human oversight alongside the code they govern.
Gavrilescu’s engineering career spans Funstage, Greentube, online gaming infrastructure, .NET, and Kubernetes. On Bloom Boom Casino, he built a backend team and gaming platform from the ground up. Born in Romania and raised in Italy, he is now active in Vienna’s engineering community.
Backlog.md addresses a recurring failure of autonomous coding: agents can misunderstand a feature, exhaust their context window, or produce changes too sprawling to review. Gavrilescu breaks larger efforts into repository-backed atomic tasks: Markdown files with structured metadata, explicit requirements, acceptance criteria, and implementation plans. A terminal Kanban board and browser interface give humans visibility into the same task state available to coding agents.
- Three human review checkpoints: Examine the task and acceptance criteria, inspect the proposed implementation plan, then review the completed code. Each checkpoint catches misunderstandings before they become larger engineering problems.
- Bounded context and parallel execution: Smaller tasks limit unwanted scope, simplify retries, and keep agent sessions focused. Independent tasks can run concurrently in Git worktrees, as Gavrilescu demonstrates in his AI Engineer Code talk.
- Local-first agent coordination: Repository-backed Markdown makes project state inspectable and shareable without requiring a hosted task database. Backlog.md initially emphasized Model Context Protocol integrations; its current workflow recommends a shared command-line interface for humans and agents while retaining optional MCP support.
- Agent-to-agent feedback: Agents Council lets agents exchange feedback through MCP, with a local desktop interface that allows people to observe and participate. Its integrations include Claude, Codex, and Gemini.
Gavrilescu also helps organize the Vienna AI Engineering Meetup and serves as a volunteer OpenAI Codex Ambassador, convening local developers to experiment with practical coding-agent workflows.
