The blog
This is where the longer stuff goes. Things that won't fit in a tweet, don't need to be a paper. AI engineering, agent architecture, design engineering, and what shipping solo actually feels like.
No newsletter, no content calendar. Posts go up when I have something worth saying. If you'd rather track new ones, RSS is the canonical feed.
The person
I'm Dee (Dmitrii Kargaev). Grew up in Siberia, lived in Moscow for a stretch, now live in Los Angeles. Started designing for the web at 14 in the late 2000s, picked up code because handoffs always meant watching the design die a little. By 2015 I was full-time freelance.
From 2019 to 2025 I was lead product designer at VALK (now DatAI Network), an institutional fintech platform used by 70+ financial institutions across 15+ countries. I designed the product behind $4B+ in managed deals. Press in CNN, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance.
Mostly independent since 2022, when I moved to LA. Contracts and retainers through dee.agency, open-source, AI agents, GEO research, product work I design and code myself. Longer version of all that lives at deeflect.com/about.
How I write
I write the way I talk. Direct, opinionated, willing to name the tools and share the numbers. If something didn't work, I'll say so. If I don't know, I'll say that too.
A lot of these posts start as voice memos that I push through my own writing pipeline. The thinking is mine. The typing isn't always.
No popups, no email gates, no related-posts wall.
What I write about
AI engineering. The plumbing behind agents that actually do work, not the demo-day kind. Multi-agent setups, tool calling, memory, the parts that fall apart in production.
Building in public. Solo workflow, ADHD stack, what shipped, what got killed, what I tried and quietly walked back.
Developer tools. Reviews and deep dives on whatever I currently keep open in a tab.
Design engineering. Where product design meets code, and why the seam between them is where most products quietly die.
Elsewhere
deeflect.com
: portfolio, papers, projects.
dee.agency
: productized work for founders.
@deeflectcom
: short-form, mostly threads.
github.com/deeflect
: open source.
LinkedIn
: the LinkedIn one.
Russian. Four years out of a suitcase across Southeast Asia and Turkey before LA. I don't do calls and I work async, which is the only thing my brain actually likes.