People I return to.

Not a ranking, and not a list of people I agree with on everything. These are people whose character, work, or way of seeing has changed how I try to build.

Faith and character

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

For mercy without weakness, discipline without spectacle, patience under pressure, and a life in which character mattered as much as conviction.

Builders

Steve Jobs

For making taste, focus, and the whole product experience inseparable from engineering.

Archive ↗

Elon Musk

For the size of the technical bets and the refusal to accept inherited limits. I do not share his political views.

X ↗

Sam Altman

For thinking in decades, noticing shifts early, and organizing people around difficult technological bets.

Writing ↗

Patrick Collison

For intellectual curiosity, clear writing, and showing that a technology company can care deeply about craft.

X ↗

AI and computer science

Andrej Karpathy

For making difficult ideas legible and treating neural networks as things to understand, not magic to invoke.

Website ↗

Yann LeCun

For foundational work in machine learning and the willingness to argue about what current systems still cannot do.

X ↗

Tibo

For helping make advanced AI feel like a usable tool, especially through Codex and ChatGPT.

X ↗

Mitchell Hashimoto

For building tools programmers love and proving that technical depth and product taste can live in the same person.

X ↗

Jason Liu

For making evaluation, structured extraction, and production LLM work concrete enough to use.

Website ↗

Design

Jason Yuan

For interfaces that feel speculative without losing their humanity, and for treating operating systems as a design medium.

X ↗

Meaghan Choi

For giving agentic tools like Claude Code and Cowork a calmer, more legible surface.

X ↗

Yash Bhardwaj

For software that is expressive, useful, and culturally alive at the same time.

X ↗