Calgary, Canada
Ali Reza Erfanthinks out loud.
Building software products. Writing honestly about what it means to stay relevant, stay human, and use AI as a tool for thinking — not a substitute for it.
Latest essay
The Overwhelm Is the Threat,
Not the AI
The quieter fear — not replacement, but pace. How anxiety about keeping up creates the very thing you're anxious about.
Read essay →Ideas about AI, building products, and what we lose when we stop thinking for ourselves.
The Overwhelm Is the Threat, Not the AI
The quieter fear — not replacement, but pace. How anxiety about keeping up creates the very thing you're anxious about.
What I mean when I say I'm afraid of being left behind
An honest account of the pressure developers feel right now — and what I'm doing about it.
Every PKM tool gets it wrong — a first principles breakdown
Storage is solved. Delivery isn't. Why your highlight archive is a graveyard.
The gap between AI progress and AI adoption is where the opportunity lives
Most businesses are 3 years behind what's already possible. That's not a problem. It's a map.
Open source tools worth knowing: MiroFish and the simulation turn in AI forecasting
Why predicting how ideas move through systems is harder than predicting the ideas themselves.
New essays, occasionally.
No digest. No cadence. Just writing worth reading.
I build real products — not demos, not experiments. Things people actually use. Right now that means Markbase, a smart bookmark manager I've been quietly building for the past year.
I feel the pace of this moment acutely. AI is moving faster than most of us can track, and I write about that honestly — the pressure, the opportunity, and the harder question of how to keep thinking for yourself when the tools around you will do it for you if you let them.
I also help small businesses in Calgary understand what AI actually means for them — not the hype version, the useful one.
Based in
Calgary, Alberta
Currently building
Markbase — smart bookmark manager
Writing about
AI, building products, staying human
Available for
Conversations worth having
Live — soft launch
Markbase
A smart bookmark manager that treats saved links as a knowledge layer, not a pile of URLs. Browser extensions, weekly digests, and an engine that surfaces the right thing at the right moment.
In progress
Next project
Something worth building. Details soon.
If something here
resonated, let's talk.
Founders building AI-adjacent products, developers navigating the same questions I am, or anyone who wants to think through an idea — I read everything.
✉ ali@aliriza.ai