The Art of Clarity in AI with Misha Kharkovski

When you talk to Misha, one of Pattern’s AI analysts, one word comes up often: clarity.

It’s an unexpected throughline for someone whose career began in graphic design and now centers on the intricate logic of AI systems. But for Misha, the connection is natural. “Design taught me how to think visually and how to create structure out of chaos,” he says. “That’s exactly what we do with data every day.”

A Nonlinear Path to AI

Misha’s journey started in community college, where he earned an associate’s degree in graphic design. But a few key conversations with his father, a longtime software engineer, inspired him to pivot toward computer science. “I’ve always loved technology,” he says. “Once I understood how software could actually shape experiences, I wanted to go deeper.”

After transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, Misha took on roles that bridged creativity and computation, web development, AI consulting, and cloud infrastructure. Each one, he says, “was a different kind of design challenge of how to get a system to respond the way you want.”

That mindset eventually led him to Pattern, where he now applies his design-driven approach to prompt engineering, profile configuration, and analyzing AI responses within Pattern’s medical and legal workflows.

Teaching AI to Read the Unreadable

At Pattern, Misha works with data that’s anything but standardized. “Medical documents aren’t uniform,” he says. “Different providers, different decades, different formats, it’s all over the place. Even the same medical term can mean slightly different things in different contexts.”

That’s where Misha’s blend of creativity and precision comes in. His role involves tuning prompts and testing outputs so that Pattern’s systems extract the most accurate, context-aware insights possible. “We define ‘best’ in a few ways,” he explains. “It’s not just accuracy, it’s about what’s actually useful to our clients.”

Contributing to the Frontier: Safe Passage

Misha also contributed to Pattern’s Safe Passage research project, which tackled one of AI’s toughest problems: reducing hallucinations. “It was my first time working on a formal research paper,” he says. “Joe mentored us through the process. I helped with the early proof-of-concept scripts and later with data labeling for training.”

What stood out most wasn’t just the technical achievement; it was the discovery that meaningful models can be built with surprisingly little data. “We got great results from just a few hours of labeling,” Misha recalls. “It showed how much value you can get from high-quality, focused data.”

That insight echoes across Pattern’s work: accuracy and defensibility often come from precision of process, not volume of data.

Beyond the Office: Strength, Focus, and Coffee

Outside of Pattern, Misha channels the same discipline he brings to AI into his other passions: CrossFit coaching and specialty coffee. “I’ve been coaching CrossFit for almost 10 years,” he says. “It’s all about consistency and attention to detail. Just like coding, really.”

He’s also a self-proclaimed coffee enthusiast who recently helped organize a local specialty coffee club after attending the U.S. AeroPress Championships in New York. “There’s so much nuance in brewing,” he laughs. “It’s like prompt tuning for flavor.”

Designing Systems and a Career with Intention

Misha’s career may have started in design, but that foundation continues to shape how he thinks about AI. Whether he’s refining a prompt or labeling data, his focus is the same: clarity, consistency, and impact.

“The work we’re doing at Pattern has the potential to make legal and medical workflows faster, fairer, and more accurate,” he says. “If we can make complex information easier to understand, we’re doing something that really matters.”