Omid Sayfun

I have spent most of my career across FinTech and e-commerce. These days most of my energy goes into how AI changes engineering work: what agents are good at, where they fall over in production, and what that means for how teams ship.

Outside of work, I’m typically at the gym, coding on a side project, or playing padel.

Notes from building with AI agents, plus whatever else teaches me something. The latest five:

Flaky E2E tests have been part of my day-to-day for a long time. A simple UI change or timeout could easily break my flow and steal focus time. So here is my new project:

• Smoketest - AI-assisted E2E testing. The tests your agents don't write.

I use an extensive list of tools and software in my daily life. I can't live without some of them (painkillers) and some of them are just nice to have (vitamins). Here is a list of my current stack:

• Raycast - Give it a shot and you will never want to go back to macOS spotlight.
• Bartender - I have a million menu bar icons and this is the only way to manage them.
• cmux - This is the best terminal replacement and fully integrated with most of coding agents.
• OpenWhispr - You speak 3x faster than you type. Who knew?
• BetterDisplay - Best tool to manage your external monitors on Mac.
• Telegram - I use Telegram for everything. It is the app that I use first thing in the morning.
• Beekeeper Studio - The best SQL editor I have used.
• Visual Studio Code - I migrated back from Cursor and use VS code as a git diff review / text editor.
• ChatGPT Codex - My daily driver for agentic coding. I hit the rate limits most weeks.
• OrbStack - The best way to run Docker containers on macOS.
• MacBook Pro , AirPods Pro , iPhone - I'm a heavy Apple user.

I try to code and workout every day. Here you can find my activity in the last 6 months:

I have been fortunate to have traveled to many countries. My goal is to visit 30 countries by the end of 2030.

I subscribe to a number of different newsletters and youtube channels. I try to read anything that teaches me something new. Most of them end up in my AI agent inbox and I just read the summaries. Here is a list of my favorite ones that I fully read and recommend:

• Naval - I have followed Naval for a long time. He talks about startups, investing, and life in a philosophical way.
• Collaborative Fund - Reading Pure Independence by Morgan Housel hooked me immediately. They write about economics, markets, and investing with great storytelling.
• The Diary of a CEO - Steven Bartlett interviews successful people from different fields about their journey, mindset, and life.
• Farnam Street - Introduced by Naval and I have been a fan ever since. They write about mental models, decision making, and learning applicable to real life.
• Mark Manson - I got bored in the middle of his most famous book, then found his newsletter and liked it a lot more. He writes about self improvement, philosophy, and life in an honest way.

The best way to reach me is email at [email protected]. I read everything and reply to most.

If your team is shipping AI-written code and figuring out what that does to reviews and testing, I would especially like to hear from you.