Hey, I'm Avi Shefi

I’m a software engineer with 12 years consulting on large-scale infrastructure, cloud architecture, and lately AI tooling and autonomous agent systems.

I build and debug things that must run reliably at scale: high-throughput backends, resilient distributed setups, and designs that deliver real value without exploding costs or complexity.

I write about what comes out of that work: architecture tradeoffs, decisions that stay stuck longer than they should, and what I’ve learned from enough clients to see where things tend to go wrong.

Read about how I think and work, check out the blog.

Recent Posts

  • The Dopamine Revolution
    · 5 min read

    LLMs have a pull that productive tools haven't had before. Variable reinforcement explains the mechanism, but the efficiency gains and the reward loop are running on separate tracks.

  • FOMO is a Wonderful Thing
    · 4 min read

    FOMO is usually dismissed as a distraction. In engineering teams, the collective version of it moves things that good arguments don't.

  • Start With the Monolith
    · 8 min read

    Teams that adopt microservices before they have the problems microservices solve usually front-load design problems.

  • Why More Planning Won't Get You Unstuck
    · 6 min read

    Most decisions are not about what to add. They are about what you cannot do.

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