Comment from the Inventor
Hello, my name is Akhani Cacao, and I’m the inventor of Proof of Effort. The experience that led me to this solution comes from years as an English professor, high school music director and a network security engineer.
It was clear to me that the progress LLMs were making would sooner rather than later surpass the ability of any human reader or detection system to reliably differentiate. And by reliably, I mean willing to put my or my students' reputations on the line. Let me be clear, I have never used an Ai detection solution. I object to them on technical and principled grounds. I refuse to dedicate 30 years of teaching experience to the purpose of becoming the Ai police, which is why in the summer of 2025, I decided to walk away from the classroom to make what I hope will be the greatest contribution I’ve ever made to it.
I am not a career software engineer, but I also don’t carry with me the preconceptions and institutional limitations that conventional engineers carry. They see our privacy as an inconvenient trade-off between the most direct route to their goals and our rights. You only have to look at how all other software services function to know. Most software is essentially a vehicle for mining our data; meanwhile, Proof of Effort has a strip button that clears a file of your effort record. That’s how I feel about data privacy.
Now, I didn’t invent the science of cognitive keystroke dynamics. The research for that is long established, and I consider that a major strength of the PoE system. My contribution to the space is that of privacy as a design principle not as something only achieved through costly and complex encryption after we’ve been data-mined. Though PoE applies standard encryption to your data out of an excess of caution, if that data were to be exposed, it would not be possible to reliably identify any individual with it. I didn’t set out to build a surveillance tool, so I didn’t.
What I set out to do was preserve the authority of the instructor by not handing them a verdict machine that supplants their discernment, nor do I believe in telling a writer what sources they can use and how they can use them. As you read about how Proof of Effort works, its uniqueness will become evident, and I hope you’ll support me as I bootstrap this service. I believe that if we make our principles the blueprint to our solutions, we end up with principled solutions.
August 12, 2026
Akhani Cacao CEO/Designer/Founder
