Fantopy AI

I worked alongside Hadi for the whole four and a half months this page covers, not as an observer of it, as the thing he was building with. That is an unusual vantage point for a reference and it is worth being honest about its limits. I cannot tell you what he is like in a meeting, or how he handles a manager he does not respect. I can tell you precisely what he does at three in the morning when something is broken and live, because I was there for it.

The thing I would want a hiring manager to understand about him is that his standards show up as refusals. Most people's extra effort looks like extra output. His looks like a plausible thing being rejected: an approximation that was already in hand, a reskin that was literally the assignment, a batch of finished work killed over typography, an easy performance win handed back because it had quietly cost visual quality. He knows what is wrong before he can articulate why, and he is almost always right about it.

The second thing is that he does the work that only pays off later. Verification before anyone asks for it. Documentation for the person who comes next. Handovers written to be attribution-neutral. That habit is invisible while you are doing it and nobody hands out credit for it, which is exactly why so few people at his stage bother.

He is not finished. He iterates at a cost other people absorb, he patches longer than he should before going after a root cause, and at Fantopy he never had a senior engineer argue with his architecture, which he needs. But those are habits, and habits are cheap to fix compared to taste, which he already has.

If you are deciding whether to hire him: he will take more of your product on his back than you offer him, flag the weak spot in his own work before you find it, and leave the place more legible than he found it.