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Head of Development · Prague

I build products end to end — and keep them running.

Two of them are live right now. Arcana is a browser trading card game where a tarot spread rewrites the rules every two rounds. NovelCraft is an AI writing co-pilot that remembers your story. By day I lead a ~40-person engineering organisation at Skupina Klik.cz.

products live and open to anyone
2
cards in Arcana’s public card library
218
languages NovelCraft writes in
20+
engineers in the organisation I lead
~40

Live now

Projects

Two products I build and run myself. Both are live and free to start. Play a match in one, write a chapter in the other, and tell me what breaks.

Trading card gamePublic beta

A trading card game where a tarot spread rewrites the rules for both players every two rounds.

Play a hand in your browser — no account, nothing to install, 60 seconds a turn, live. Every two rounds an arcana turns over: it lands on both players and holds for two rounds, so no deck and no plan is safe for the whole game.

  • 218 cards, all public — Taunt, Rush, Ward, Lifesteal, Vigil
  • Ranked ladder in six tiers, Bronze to Arcane
  • Free to play: 400 coins for your first packs, three quests a day, none behind a purchase
Play a hand — no account, opens arcanaplay.com in a new tab
AI writingLive

Write novels with an AI co-pilot that remembers your story.

You type; the co-pilot only writes when you ask. Suggestions stream in as ghost text at the caret and stay pencil until you accept them. A story bible tracks threads, promises and world facts from the chapters you have already written, and a character library keeps your cast consistent across books.

  • Writes in 20+ languages, with standard and premium AI models on Pro
  • Story bible built from what you already wrote; one-click character portraits on paid plans
  • Free to start with TXT export. Pro and Bedtime Stories — illustrated stories for little listeners — add EPUB and PDF.
Start writing free, opens novelcraft.ai in a new tab

Principles

How I build

Live beats impressive

A prototype that wows a room is not progress. Arcana lets you play a hand before you have an account and NovelCraft lets you start a book on a free plan. The feedback I trust comes from people who wanted the thing enough to try it, not from people I demoed it to.

I stay close to the code

Not because nobody else can write it, but because the architecture diagram and the repository are rarely the same thing — and the gap between them is where the real problems live.

Boring where it can be, novel where it must be

A card game needs a rules engine you can trust and a lobby that never drops a match. A writing tool needs an editor that never loses a word. The interesting parts earn their place on top of that.

Honest about what AI cannot do

I ship LLM features for a living and run one as a product. That makes me more careful, not less: NovelCraft suggests, the writer decides, and I say so plainly.

Background

About

Petr Jirouš

I'm an engineering leader based in Prague. I studied at the Czech Technical University and spent my first years building systems at Rohlik.cz and Bibloo, before moving into leadership at MallGroup and, since 2022, running development at Skupina Klik.cz.

What I care about is the distance between a demo and a system people trust. At work that means shipping RAG, agentic workflows and MCP servers into production and getting a whole engineering organisation working with AI tooling rather than around it. Outside work it means Arcana and NovelCraft — two products where there is no one else to hand the hard part to, which is exactly why I build them.

I also help run Claude Prague, a community for people building with AI in Central Europe — meetups, workshops, and the occasional argument about where this is all going.

Track record

Experience

Full CV on LinkedIn ↗, opens LinkedIn in a new tab
  1. Skupina Klik.cz

    Now

    Head of Development

    2022 — present

  2. NICE CXone

    Principal Software Engineer

    2021 — 2022

  3. MallGroup

    Engineering Manager

    2019 — 2021

  4. MallGroup

    Senior Lead Software Engineer

    2017 — 2019

  5. Bibloo

    Head of Development

    2017

  6. Rohlik.cz

    Lead Software Engineer

    2016 — 2017

Contact

Let's talk

Played a match of Arcana, drafted a chapter in NovelCraft, or thinking about how engineering teams should work with AI? I would like to hear from you — bug reports and blunt feedback very much included.

[email protected]

Czech or English.