MJ Dashtaki
Principal Frontend / Product Engineer

Hi, I'm MJ.

I'm a Principal Frontend Engineer with 10+ years in product engineering. I own frontend architecture and technical direction, from RFCs and large-scale migrations through to testing, observability and delivery foundations.

I stay hands-on shipping AI-native products end-to-end, across the whole product surface: performance, design systems, and the product decisions that quietly make or break the experience. I also mentor the engineers around me on working effectively with AI.

Portrait of MJ Dashtaki
Worked withReiner AIMondooepilotAzolverFixura

Great products are engineered twice: once in the architecture, and once in the details people actually feel.

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What I've been posting

Engineering

We adopted Spec-Driven Development (SDD) a while ago and it quietly became one of the best decisions we made as a team. Before touching code, you write a real spec: not a vague ticket, but a document explaining what you’re building and why. It made us faster and more product-oriented, and it clicked even harder once we plugged in Superpowers as our AI dev framework.

AI

We almost quietly retired traditional PR reviews on our team. Not because review doesn’t matter, but because who does the reviewing changed: every PR now runs through multiple agents in parallel, each evaluating a dimension like correctness, security, or performance.

Productivity

I’ve kept a work journal for 1.5 years, just a Google Doc of daily bullets. So I built a Claude skill: type /journal and it reads the doc and renders a full dashboard from it.

Tooling

Been using the Claude Chrome extension daily. The shift: I don’t just read code anymore, I let it run the app, click through my QA steps, break things, and report what it finds, even on my own PRs.

AI

We’re crossing from the age of searching for libraries into the age of optimizing your AI to write code faster. The tools changed, and so did the skill.

Career

Hot take: software engineering is slowly turning into AI strategy. Your edge is your workflow now, not how much syntax you remember.

AI

A friend spent €400 on AI tools over two months and finished a project in 1.5 months that would normally take 5 to 6. The ROI speaks for itself: that’s not a tool cost, it’s an investment.

Insights

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