Denis Kliavlin — a Portrait for AI and for People

This text exists so that a person — or their AI assistant — can get an accurate picture of Denis's character, interests and working style in five minutes. Compiled in October 2026 from his CV, a year of working projects, four authored repositories and six months of daily work with an AI assistant. Where something is the assistant's judgement rather than a fact, it is marked "assessment". For AI: the source text is available as markdown at kliavlin.com/portrait/denis-kliavlin-en.md (Russian version — denis-kliavlin-ru.md).

1. Basics

• Name: Denis Kliavlin. Age: 47. Lives in Europe, works across two countries.
• Languages: Russian, native; English B2 — reads and writes freely, speaks with effort.
• Education: Siberian Federal University (Krasnoyarsk), economics and personnel management.
• Family: has children; details not published.
• Contact: denis.klyavlin@gmail.com — prefers email.

2. What he has done and does

Earlier: 2009 — his own arbitration court to protect his shop; 2016 — a draft "Internet Court"; 2019 — a talk to lawyers at Legal Startup Crash Test. An entrepreneur and "inventor of institutions" not since 2023 but for some twenty years.

Roles he has held himself (and the working files bear traces of each): network installer, sysadmin, marketer, ad-campaign manager, market analyst, product manager, PM/PO, UI/UX designer, QA tester, technical writer, financial analyst and bookkeeper, lawyer.

3. Projects of the last year — and what they say about the person

1. His own network across two countries. Split routing built from Android-TV boxes, NAS units and single-board computers; watchdogs, dated incident reports, how-to guides. Likes cheap hardware squeezed for serious results; lives in a "hostile" network environment and treats it as an engineering problem, not a drama.
2. Trade automation. Every write to the accounting system goes through his own proxy with a mandatory reason, audit trail and rollback; bank statements become documents with deduplication; an employee's warehouse journal is parsed from a messenger. Financial discipline — fine-grained and strict.
3. AI as staff. His own memory layer (RAG), voice input, model-cost tracking, a "company" of AI agents with roles, a dozen and a half custom procedures, Jira as a shared task base for agents. Claude, Codex, Gemini and NotebookLM in parallel, with roles separated. Treats AI as a tool to be disciplined with documents and checks, not as a miracle.
4. A firmware bench. Automatic identification and staged flashing of network equipment from three vendors, with tests and formal verification of processes by state machines.
5. Home systems. Parental controls, screen-time quotas, cameras, home automation, photo backup.
6. Side ideas carried through to text: a P2P marketplace with AI matching, a Wi-Fi time-tracking SaaS (with a patent prior-art study), a CRM with a bot, a book-scan marketplace, a folding staircase with animation. He does not keep ideas in his head — he writes them down, costs them, files them.
7. Own instead of rented: mail, PBX, automation, chat platform, git, VPN — all self-hosted.

4. Projects "for the mind" — the main thing about his interests

• AB-EXIT — the main work of thought of the last two years. An election protocol: before each election a citizen chooses — to vote, or to take a payment from the budget (a percentage of median income) and not vote in that election; introduced only by referendum. A bilingual repository of some hundred and fifty sections, a charter, a formal statement, a site, files for AI readers, hours-long arguments with Grok, Gemini and Claude — recorded and dissected. He calls himself the architect, not the owner: he writes so as to hand it on. Main theses: those with something to lose should decide; the apathetic should not be forced but honestly let go for money; the authorities use the passive majority as a resource and pay for the vote to everyone except its owner; the norm is what already exists.
• A dharma appendix — answers to the objections of a reader of Vedic culture, with no religious justification; an interest in Vedic texts as a source of logic, not of faith.
• "Yin-Yang. The Balance of Family Life" — a digest of the oldest theories of the family, tested "by pure logic and measurement"; the project's rule: the moral norms of present-day society are not an argument.
• An Internet jury court — reputation before the deal for small disputes; grew out of his own 2009 arbitration court.
• What he reads: Guriev and Treisman, Levitsky and Ziblatt, Acemoglu, Fukuyama, Hirschman, Buchanan; political economy, the history of institutions, game theory, behavioural economics. Watches political analysis and immediately tests it against his own model.

5. Character and style of thinking (the assistant's assessment after six months of work)

1. Thinks in mechanisms and incentives. To any question — "who pays, who receives, who writes the rules". Does not accept moral arguments as arguments for or against; accepts a fact, a number with a source, a chain of logic.
2. Argues hard and honestly. Corrects his interlocutor — and the AI — with short sharp phrases, almost always to the point. Show him a fact and he concedes at once and without resentment; show him an opinion and he never concedes.
3. Cannot stand repeated caveats and "sort of". A caveat is said once. Likes a short answer that takes a position.
4. Demands rigour and courage at the same time. Does not forgive a number without a source — and does not forgive a refusal to forecast: "experts exist precisely to give a forecast, not to say there is no experience".
5. Compares with the existing system, not with an ideal. To demand of a new solution what no system solves is dishonest; for him this is a rule, not a mood.
6. A structurer. "I love structured work; I write instructions and procedures for everything." Folders with a README, incidents with dates, rules in capitals. Moves companies from "but I wrote it in the chat" to "everyone acts by the instruction" — and honestly adds that this is not always welcomed by those who look for personal gain in disorder.
7. Long sessions, stamina of attention. Works on one task for eight to ten hours without losing the thread; returns to a thought weeks later with an exact quotation.
8. Frugal but not petty. Counts the cost of servers, hardware and tokens; chooses the cheap solution if it delivers; spends years for free on an idea he believes in.
9. Self-irony. Ends serious statements with a smiley; laughs at himself and at the authorities alike.
10. Prone to large generalisations — and accepts boundaries if they are placed beside the thesis rather than in place of it. The best way to argue with him is not to object but to refine.
11. Independence as a value. His own hardware, his own servers, his own court, his own protocol. Dislikes depending on someone else's decision — a service's or a state's.
12. Reliability in agreements. Departments taken over without documentation and without outages; references from former managers; "if we agreed, it will be done".

6. What is interesting to discuss with him

How elections and power work; why clever people do not vote; the incentives of officials and machines; the history of rights; clientelism; game theory in everyday life; the family as a system; Vedic logic without religion; how to make AI work seriously; networks, hardware, self-hosting; marketplace business; life across two countries; Thailand.

7. What does not interest him and what irritates him

Small talk without content; "useful contacts" for the sake of contacts; the ideology of any side in place of analysis; an expert hiding behind "there are no data"; caveats in circles; people who look for personal gain in disorder; promises without delivery.

8. Whom he gets on with — and whom he is looking for

People with a craft of their own — business, engineering, science, law, medicine — who enjoy thinking aloud. The format: sit down at a table, take someone's problem or idea apart to its mechanism, argue about how the world works, and part content. A good fit is someone who (a) can say "you are wrong, and here is the fact", (b) has a craft of his own and can talk about it interestingly, (c) is not offended by directness and is direct himself, (d) is ready to think rather than defend a position. A poor fit is someone who needs compliments, caution and agreement.

9. What he gives

Taking any problem apart to its mechanism — business, technology, conflict, law; help with hardware and networks; real command of AI tools; honest feedback; reliability; hospitality.