wvlen

In just a few hours, Dan completely changed how I work with AI. I went from only trusting the technology for trivial tasks to running many parallel agents at once, relying on it for all of my day to day coding work. He taught me how to plan with, provide effective feedback for and invest in my agent.

I worked with Dan at Block, where we co-hosted AI office hours for the company. Before those sessions, I had no real path into agentic coding -- it felt out of reach. Dan taught me one-on-one how to set up and actually use the tools, and now it's part of how I work every day. What stuck with me most, though, was watching him do the same for designer after designer. He had a gift for unlocking creativity and potential in people across the whole company, patiently and without ego. He elevated our entire design team through his mentorship, and that impact has far outlasted any single session. Anyone who gets to work with Dan is lucky.

Dan came into the project without deep content expertise, and he worked hard to understand the full scope and nature of the problem we were trying to solve. His strength is finding responsive, creative technical solutions using software development, machine learning, and AI, and he helped us create a workflow to conduct analysis at scale in a highly secure environment, something that simply was not possible before in our work. He worked with our non-technical team collaboratively, with a great deal of patience and curiosity, and helped us understand our own research questions in a new way.

I have found tremendous educational value in working with Dan on several projects across disciplines. He models a unique ability to elicit, frame, and target the core features of any problem. Dan taught me to build such a skillset and use it, with the help of AI tools, to find elegant and rigorously validated solutions using powerful computational approaches outside my domain of expertise.