personal notes

AI Notes - Holiday 2026 Edition

Here are some personal notes I gathered while working with AI tools and agents over the last month. General Findings and Musings Most of the times I think we are too obsessed with the models. I found most of them to be good enough for my use cases, while my workflows are still all taped together. I am using Sonnet 4.5 as my daily driver. I think the devil is in the workflow and context. However, everyone raving about how good Opus 4.5 is makes it worth trying. Agents are very slow. This is a hell for folks with attention deficit. The fact that we argue for the benefits of worktrees with multiple pieces on the go is telling. We discard humans’ cognitive load and context window just because agents have context and speed problem is ironic. When it comes to extraneous tasks, automation, or migrations, it makes sense to have multiple agents working in parallel on irrelevant pieces of work. Yet to experiment with applying parallel agents for high-value product work that requires critical thinking and focus. I see lots of people are too focused on the agents, instead of actually building something with them. I think the learning is in the latter. Commit Messages / PRs Git commit messages provide a lot of context for future implementations. They essentially can be journaled to build context for the agents; therefore, I think there are more reasons to: ...

December 23, 2025 · 4 min · Amir Mohtasebi
Where ai helps in reducing cognitive load, and where it does not?

Where is our current focus on applying AI to optimise our cognitive load?

Where is our current focus on applying AI to optimise our cognitive load? Let’s start with a simplified explanation of cognitive load: Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort being used in working memory, or put simply, how much your brain is juggling right now. Since working memory has limited capacity, it is important to ensure it is used on the most value-creating tasks. The three types of cognitive loads are: ...

December 23, 2025 · 3 min · Amir Mohtasebi

Effectiveness, Efficiency, Productivity

Using right words in the right context can solve a lot of misalignments. This is my attempt to document my opinionated understanding of some of the engineering management terminologies, and use them as a reference in my other documents. Effort, Output, Outcome, Impact Effort: This is the input and investment in an initiative or a job that needs to be completed. In a software project, this may be the number of engineers working for a specific period with a particular capability, the computing resources allocated to it, and all the supporting roles, such as product or project teams. ...

July 12, 2025 · 3 min · Amir Mohtasebi
Some Days, as a Leader, You Deserve a Donut

Some Days, as a Leader, You Deserve a Donut

In the life of a tech worker, such as an engineer, product manager, or designer, there is a time and opportunity to step into a leadership role. There are many good (and not-so-good) reasons to step into these roles. In the case of so many people around me, It was mainly because they believed they could do a better job than others. This was not necessarily because they were superbly good at leadership from day one but primarily because the leadership approach others had in mind differed from how they felt we should run a tech team and organisation. ...

October 13, 2024 · 4 min · Amir Mohtasebi
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