Pareto 20, No. 16: Dheeraj Sharma, for deciding what not to automate

A newsletter that opens with an ROI test before it shows you a workflow, names the automation that cost him $300 unattended, and reads vendor documentation before repeating a claim.

Seat 16 on The Pareto 20 is Dheeraj Sharma, and it is the automation seat for people who have already built one automation too many.

Who he is

Sharma describes himself as a software engineer with twenty years in enterprise cloud and AI platforms who leads a cloud cost-management practice by day at an employer he does not name, and who has been publishing in some form for seventeen years. His newsletter, GenAI Unplugged, posts two or three times a week and describes its reader as "a solopreneur, consultant, or small business owner (1-100 people)" who wants "here's what I built, copy this, here's what to do when it breaks." That is the closest any seat on this list comes to naming our reader in their own words.

What to read him for

The test before the build. Stop Automating Everything. Decide What You Keep Instead. (August 29, 2026) gives a rule you can apply in a minute: ten minutes saved a day for a year justifies about four hours of build time, and not much more. It also names his own expensive mistake: "My n8n retries ran to about $300 because I left them unattended." Read that before you leave anything unattended.

A vendor claim, checked against the manual. On September 6, 2026 he reviewed a new multi-agent product and corrected a privacy claim made on its own launch stream by reading the documentation: "Every Bot on your account shares one computer: browser sessions, files, and command-line credentials are shared." That is the independence test this list runs, passed in public.

Deterministic first. Ask AI What to Build and You Have Already Lost (August 26, 2026) argues that a model "is a superb implementer and no judge at all of your context," and that for many tasks you should reach for rules before probability: "Regex first, for two reasons: it is cheaper, and you control the result." Unfashionable and correct.

Naming two things that get confused. Claude Skills vs Subagents (August 27, 2026) is a clean disambiguation with templates, for anyone who has been using the two interchangeably.

Cost verdicts on "free." Archive entries from August 22 and September 8, 2026 take apart two "run it for free" routes for a popular coding agent, one via a cheap model and one via a routing service, and warn about the alias "that quietly bills you." We could read only the archive summaries of those two, not the full posts, so treat them as titles until you open them.

Start here

Stop Automating Everything. Free, dated, and the whole editorial stance in one post.

What he sells, and what that means for you

A paid newsletter tier (around $7 to $8 a month), a live cohort course on a coding agent (a founding price of $797 and a listed later price of $1,597), and a set of his own small products including a Substack automation tool and an n8n bundle. So he sells into automation while writing about it; his frequent "do not automate this" verdicts are the counterweight. His employer is unnamed, and his about page shows signs of staleness (two different subscriber counts, a seat counter dated May 2026), so treat the marketing numbers as marketing.

Not for you if

You want a big-name authority. He is a small, consistent newsletter, and that is part of why the advice is sized for one person.

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Part of The Pareto 20, twenty creators who get a solo operator most of the way on AI decisions. How we chose them. Facts above were checked against the creator's own pages on September 12, 2026.