Danial Kalbasi

📍 Amsterdam http://danialkalbasi.com

Will your future self live with this?

A good technical tradeoff analysis is about whether your future self is willing to live with the solution. Say you are analyzing a problem and you have two solution options. Option A is technically superior to B. It's more novel, has new technical challenges that the team didn&

Working harder than usual?

If you see someone in the team suddenly start working harder than usual, there are usually two reasons: - They are looking for a new job and practicing for interviews - They want to ask you for a promotion or raise I've seen exceptions, but rarely to the

You don't need more data

A pattern I've seen often is teams trying to prove an idea by asking for more data before they build anything. Data has two fundamental problems in this situation. One is that you can prove or kill a solution with the same exact data. It all depends on

Being logical or intuitive

I came to trust people's decisions when it comes from strong intuition rather than pure logic. Sometimes someone can sound logical in a discussion, but their advice is wrong if you wait long enough.

From prompting agents to building them

The way we build software with agents focuses too much on optimizing for efficiency per task rather than rethinking the entire workflow. Focusing on individual tasks creates busywork that is not worth spending one's time on. Consider reviewing AI-generated code or AI-generated documents that take far less time

Org-wide training is a waste of time

Org-wide training is a complete waste of time. It teaches what a person should already know when they get hired. Take leadership training. If you are training your manager on how to give feedback or how to coach someone in a simple situation, it means the person was not ready

Delegate the same way to AI or a human

Giving tasks to AI agents is similar to how we delegate to humans: - Delegate what you can't or won't learn from - Delegate repetition, routine, and noise - Do the work you do best - Skip when preparation exceeds value When I delegate just because,

Transparency is costly

Transparency can cost you more in large orgs. Someone with a vague idea can convince better than someone who communicates more details. It's so counterintuitive.

Pursuing good ideas

You can only pursue your good ideas if you are willing to give up the bad ones.

DRY principle with AI agents

DRY principle translates really well while working with AI agents. Beyond code reuse which can save you a lot of tokens, is "unit of work" reuse. The idea is simple. Write a clear text file that instructs ai agent to do a single unit of work and let