Mihael Presečan · mag. ing. comp., University of Zagreb, FER
Abstract
Hiring someone to own technical direction is a claim that cannot be verified from a CV, because a CV lists
what a person was present for rather than what they decided. What follows is an attempt to state the claim
precisely and then discharge it. The argument rests on four lemmas — diagnosis, construction, depth and
handover — each supported by dated, named, linkable evidence. Where evidence does not exist, this is said
plainly rather than dressed up (see Remark 1).
The reader is invited to press check the proof.
§1The claim
1 · Statement
TheoremMihael Presečan can be trusted with the technical direction of an AI product.verified
The theorem is not self-evident and should not be taken on the strength of a
job title. It is discharged in §4 from
L1–L4,
which are proved independently in §3.
§2Terms used precisely, so the lemmas mean something
2 · Definitions
Definition 1 (bottleneck).The constraint that, if removed, changes how fast a team ships.
It is rarely the loudest problem, and it is almost never the one people volunteer in the
first meeting. Finding it is a separate skill from fixing it.
Definition 2 (handover).A system is handed over when it keeps running — and keeps changing — without the person who built it.
Documentation alone does not satisfy this. A team that can extend the thing does.
Definition 3 (evidence).A claim with a date, a name and, where one exists, a link attached.
Everything below is evidence in this sense, or is marked as not being any.
§3Four independent claims. Each is checkable on its own.
3 · Lemmas
Lemma 1 (diagnosis).He identifies the real constraint — and demonstrates it rather than arguing about it.✓ proved
Proof. By two instances.
(a) LayronRecentlayron.ai ↗The team was moving slowly, and the explanations on offer were all about scope.
Rather than argue the point, he spent three weeks building a prototype of a new extraction
pipeline — and it outperformed what six months of work on the existing stack had produced.
The proposal came after the demonstration: replace the pipeline and the technology stack, as a bet
about the following year rather than a cleanup of the previous one. With the prototype on the table,
they followed it.
(b) Klick172019–24Every new client product was restarting from the same foundation. He named the repeated
foundation as the constraint, not the headcount, and built one reusable framework for educational
SaaS instead.
Lemma 2 (construction).He builds the thing himself, at production scale, alone if necessary.✓ proved
Proof. By three instances, each a separate system.
(a) LayronRecentlayron.ai ↗He then built the MVP on the new stack himself, over six months — the same span
that had gone into the architecture his prototype replaced.
(b) KONČAR INEM2018–20On MARS, Croatia's national meter data management platform: real-time monitoring,
data synchronisation and system-migration services, engineered and deployed independently — plus the
tooling that proved the data was correct.
(c) UpclickNowupclick.me ↗His own company. An automated acquisition pipeline from signal to a shipped live site,
plus the platform that hosts everything it produces — written by one person.
Lemma 3 (depth).The AI is not a veneer; he knows what the model is doing when the abstraction leaks.✓ proved
Proof. By four instances, in reverse chronological order.
(a) ÖIF2023Designed the core algorithm of an adaptive language test: each answer updates a statistical
estimate of the examinee's level, and the next question is chosen to collapse uncertainty fastest.
(b) MSc thesis, FER2017 · SoftCOM 2018IEEE Xplore ↗Object classification for child-behaviour observation in autism diagnostics, using
Faster R-CNN to automate the frame-by-frame analysis clinicians were doing by hand. Published with
F. Petric and Z. Kovačić.
(c) FER research2016–17Pre-transformer NLP on short texts, and optimisation of virtual-machine placement across
5G topologies for total energy consumption.
(d) BSc thesis, FER2014RGB-D SLAM on a NAO humanoid using a Kinect, on ROS — a robot working out where it
was by looking around the room.
Lemma 4 (handover).What he builds outlives him, in the sense of Definition 2.✓ proved
Proof. By two instances, both still running without him.
(a) LayronRecentHe selected and trained the team that now runs the stack he introduced. He is not
the one maintaining it.
(b) Klick172019–24sellknow.com ↗repositories ↗The framework from Lemma 1 (b) was open sourced, and it is the engine underneath
SellKnow — the product built to sell it.
§4Composing the lemmas
4 · Proof of the theorem
Proof. Owning technical direction requires four things at once: seeing the real
constraint and being able to demonstrate it rather than argue it (L1, Def. 1);
the ability to execute that judgement personally, so the call is grounded rather than delegated
(L2); enough depth to tell a modelling problem from an engineering
one (L3); and the discipline to build toward your own redundancy
(L4). Lemmas 1–4 hold. The theorem
follows.
§5What follows in practice
5 · Corollaries
Corollary 1.He is most valuable before the architecture is settled.
Head of AI or AI engineering lead; founding or lead engineer on an AI product; CTO of a small
technical team; or a fractional engagement where the question is which direction, not how many hands.
Corollary 2.He is least valuable once a system is stable and the work becomes maintenance.
This follows from the same properties that make Corollary 1
true, and it is stated here rather than discovered in month seven.
§6On the absence of a metric
6 · Remark
Remark 1 (on numbers).No growth curve is offered here, because none exists yet.
Upclick is bootstrapped and still being built. There is no customer count, no revenue chart
and no retention figure, and inventing one would violate
Definition 3 and, with it, everything above.
The system and the reasoning behind it are the evidence. The metrics are not yet.
Q.E.D.
Appendix AThe record the lemmas draw on
A · The record
Recent
Layron — 3-week prototype, technical pivot, MVP, team trained
PostscriptWritten in the first person, unlike everything above it
Hanna & Michael. Click for colour.
Postscript · everything the theorem leaves out
Everything above this line is written in the third person, because that is how one writes a
proof. This part is not.
Hanna
My wife, and the steadiness underneath both halves of this page.
She is my support in the professional half — the three weeks, the six months, and a company that
still has no revenue in it. Whatever the lemmas say, none of that was done by one person; work of that kind
is carried at home as much as it is anywhere else.
The rest of it she does not merely tolerate. Hastening the return of Christ is not a private enthusiasm
of mine that she makes room for around the edges; it is the thing we are doing together, and the
writing below exists because of it.
Lemma 4 is about handing things over. She is the one thing I intend never to.
Away from the keyboardThree books, and the studies behind them
The Forgotten Pillar
I write. I have written and published three books — The Forgotten Pillar,
Rediscovering the Pillar, and The Great Controversy Over Christ’s Sonship — and they live,
together with the studies and research notes behind them, at
forgottenpillar.com.
The project is a return to the original beliefs and identity of the Seventh-day Adventist Church: what its
founders actually held, in their own words, before later reorganisation. It is historical research as much as
it is theology, which is probably why it holds me — the method is not far from the rest of this page.
Find the thing everyone has stopped examining. Go back to the sources rather than the summaries. Say what you
find, including when saying it is unwelcome. Lemma 1, in another field entirely.
Liberty of conscience2 Corinthians 1:24 — “Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand.” (KJV)
No creed or summary of belief can become that rule — however useful it is as a description.
Conscience is bound to the Word of God, and to nothing else.
The reason2 Peter 3:12 — “Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God.” (KJV)
And the reason for it
I am a Christian, and I am devoted to hastening the return of Christ. That is not a hobby running quietly
alongside the engineering; it is what the engineering is in service of, and it is why the writing exists at
all. If you have read this far, you now know the most important thing on this page — and it was not in the
theorem.