The AI Operator
Practical AI engineering, written by someone shipping it in production.
What this is
The AI Operator is a solo publication by Eugeniu Ghelbur. I write about AI agent systems - how to build them, how to evaluate them, how they break, and what’s actually working in production environments.
The audience is engineers, AI builders, and technical operators. Not “AI thought leaders,” not marketers, not people who only read about AI without shipping it.
Who I am
I’m Eugeniu Ghelbur. I work as an AI Automation Engineer at Single Grain, where I build agent systems for marketing and revenue operations. On the side, I maintain [obsidian-second-brain](https://github.com/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain) - an open-source Claude Code skill that operates an Obsidian vault as a living personal knowledge OS. 31 slash commands, MIT-licensed, 1,000+ stars.
The writing here is built on top of that vault and the systems I run for myself.
What you get
Free subscribers get roughly one post per week. About two-thirds of posts are free, indefinitely. Includes practical AI operator notes - short playbooks, real build breakdowns, and lessons from shipping AI features in production.
Paid subscribers ($8/mo or $80/yr) get every post including the deep-dive builds, plus templates and starter kits (reusable prompts, schemas, checklists), plus reply-to-email Q&A. I read paid-subscriber emails personally and answer them.
Friends ($100/yr, the founding tier) get everything in Paid, plus 30 minutes of 1:1 time per quarter, plus early access to paid posts (3-5 days before public), plus behind-the-scenes notes that never become public posts.
What this is not
- Market commentary on AI funding rounds
- “Top 10 AI tools” listicles
- Hype cycle reaction posts
- Anything you could get from any other AI newsletter
If that’s what you want, there are better-known options. Lenny’s, Stratechery, Pragmatic Engineer, Latent Space, and Import AI all do excellent work in adjacent territory.
Reach me
Reply to any email. I read them. If you’re an engineer or AI builder with a question, that’s the fastest path.
For consulting or partnership inquiries, reply to a paid-tier email and we can take it from there.
