Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
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Their words
Mental modelIncentives
Their wordsan ai is oddly well suited to this job. cassandra doesn’t want a promotion and doesn’t need the people in the channel to like her. disagreeing with the vp three times this month won’t show up in a performance review. she doesn’t have an ego invested in being right either.
Mental modelIncentives
Their wordswe say we want disagreement, but every disagreement costs the person making it a little social/political capital. do it often enough and you become the negative person. people stop evaluating the argument and start evaluating the source.
Their wordsmaking intelligence cheap does not automatically make “agency” cheap. people are constrained by time, money, confidence, health, education, institutions, family, geography; a model does not magic any of that away. there’s a perfectly believable future where these tools mostly compound the advantage of people who already have the skill, taste, money and the spare time to use them well.
Mental modelVerifiability
Their wordsa cybernetic machine can nail the task and completely miss the job. coding makes this very very easy to see because the tasks are so legible (and verifiable!): write the function, migrate the API, fix the tests.
Their wordswe tend to describe progress in agents as progress in autonomy: first they could do five minutes of work, then an hour, now we talk seriously about agents running for days. that’s impressive, but autonomy is a capability, not a product direction! the Job To Be Done tells you whether to use it.
Mental modelBottlenecks
Their wordsbuuuut my roadmap is’nt ten times shorter. and I’m definitely not ten times better at deciding what is worth building. teams haven’t started casually shipping a year of product work every month. you can look around and and it’s hard to say what software has gotten meaningfully better in the last year.
Their wordsYou can’t bring AGI to the world without a specific story of how it’s going to benefit everyone
Their wordsI need to shake my public facing friends at AI companies (devrels, posters, etc) and beg them to start using their natural voice more and stop performing like it's the zirp years, it's a red flag and you're painting yourself into a corner.
Their wordsyou shouldn’t make people earn your help by being perfectly polite while they’re having a bad time.
Their wordssomeone comes to you with a problem, just help them with the problem first. figure out the rest later.
Mental modelsPlay long games, Compounding
Their wordsyou just help people, and then ten years later something happens and all these relationships that you didn’t even realise you were building suddenly become visible.
Their wordsconsciousness itself is just a pattern matching mechanism. bugs have consciousness.
Their wordsI absolutely think machines can be conscious, and it’s not a dramatic thing to believe.
Their wordsIt's clear to me that consciousness can exist in other substrates than humans, including in digital systems.
Their wordsThe thing I learned this year is that when engineers say they like working on “hard problems”, they actually don't. What they like is puzzle solving, and having a repertoire of patterns that they can pattern match onto traditionally hard problems, usually involving databases or something with scale, etc.
Their wordsUnfortunately, in 2026, well, you have a cheat code machine that has infinite breadth and depth for pattern matching.