About

I’m Vitalik Garan. I build things with AI, think about products, and occasionally have opinions worth writing down.

I’m never on time, but kind of always on schedule.

I’ve spent years working across product, engineering, and the weird space where they overlap. These days I work primarily with AI — not as a trend-chaser, but because it’s the most interesting problem space I’ve found. The kind where you ship something on Monday and it’s obsolete by Friday.

Before that: product roles, engineering roles, the whole spectrum from “write the spec” to “fix the deploy at 2am.” I’ve done both and I know which one teaches you more.

Thesis

The thing that makes us beautiful — our differences — is the same thing that divides us. The same diversity that makes us worth saving is what makes us impossible to organize. AI just learned from the data. And scaled it up.

We rebuild inequality even when we start from nothing. We form classes even when we’re identical. The same traits that made us apex predators — the ones that got us here — are now hunting us. It hasn’t been survival of the fittest for a long time. It’s survival of the system.

And then there’s war. War is to the left, war is to the right, wherever you are now, it’s near, it’s there — it’s not only AA and drones, it’s also there if there’s not a cloud in your sky. I know a lot about it and nothing at the same time. More about how we got here, why, how do we get out of this mess, should we even try, how, how?

Will AI be the end of it? Maybe all hope is lost. Maybe it isn’t. Nobody knows. But there’s a Pandora’s box that needs scratching — with an old screwdriver if we can find one, and if not, just use the keys.

Why “false guru”

The internet is full of people who figured out one thing and built an entire persona around it. I’m not doing that. I don’t have a framework to sell you. I don’t have 7 steps to anything.

What I do have is a habit of thinking out loud, and enough experience to know that the most honest answer to most questions is “it depends.”

This site is where I write about the world, AI, war, product building, career decisions, and whatever else seems worth saying. Sometimes I’ll be right. Sometimes I won’t. That’s the deal. Wait, there’s no deal.

What I’m working on

• Building AI-powered tools and products
• Writing about what I learn along the way — the reflected part of it
• Figuring out what’s real and what’s hype in the AI space
• The modern world, war, peace, capitalism, us, them, all of it
• I created this blog to talk about tech, but honestly tech itself worries me less than what it’s doing to us. Rephrasing George Carlin: it’s not AI that’s fucked — it’s us, because of AI.

Elsewhere

• brokenpromises.dev - my home landing page, go land
• GitHub - my 2015-2025 empty github, which is in renaissance since late 2025, go git some
• LinkedIn - my page at that very sad place on the internet. Nobody knows who ruined it. Nobody knows how to fix it.