Khalil Khabibullin

East of Eden

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was an amazing read. It follows generations of two families in California’s Salinas Valley from the Civil War era into the early twentieth century — and underneath the family saga is a sustained meditation on the nature of good and evil.

The central idea — timshel, “thou mayest” — is that humans have the choice to overcome their nature. Not that they will. Not that it’s easy. Just that the choice exists. Steinbeck builds the entire novel around this single Hebrew word, and by the time it pays off at the end, it hits like a freight train.

Now

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What I'm focused on right now. Updated monthly.

The Culture Series

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There aren’t many authors with universal acclaim across the sci-fi reading community. Iain Banks is one of them, and the Culture series is his masterpiece.

The Culture is a post-scarcity civilisation run by benevolent AI “Minds” — and the series explores what happens when that civilisation interacts with ones that are messier, more violent, more recognisably ours. It’s utopia written by someone smart enough to know that utopia is boring — so every book finds the cracks.

The Three-Body Problem

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This was the book that put Chinese sci-fi on my radar. The setup is deceptively simple: alien civilisation detects Earth, plans invasion. But Liu Cixin layers in the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the psychology of civilisational despair, and some genuinely unsettling physics.

What I liked most was how the book imagines society’s reaction to the news — the fracture between those who welcome the invasion and those who resist. The Trisolaran “sophon” concept (subatomic AI spies that block fundamental physics research) is one of the most creative hard sci-fi ideas I’ve encountered.

Why I Build My Own AI Assistant

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I work in AI strategy at a large bank. I spend my days figuring out how 7,000 people should adopt AI tools. And then I come home and build my own.

This isn’t a contradiction. It’s the same instinct: I don’t trust anything I haven’t built (or at least taken apart).

The setup

The core is n8n — an open-source workflow automation tool running on my home server. On top of it, I’ve built what I call the Family Bot: an orchestrator that connects WhatsApp and Telegram to a set of sub-agents, each handling a different domain.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The longer story — origin, career, what drives me.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How to reach me.

Interests

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What I care about beyond work.