Book · 2025
Think Like Code
A 6-Step Mental Coding Framework. Structured decision-making for leaders, creators, and operators working at the intersection of human cognition and AI systems.
The Premise
The same cognitive habits that make a senior engineer effective — decomposing problems, defining inputs and outputs, naming things precisely, debugging assumptions — turn out to be radically useful far outside engineering. Think Like Code turns those habits into a six-step framework you can apply to any complex decision, whether you write software or not.
The book is not about learning to program. It's about borrowing the discipline of code as a mental model: making the implicit explicit, the ambiguous testable, and the chaotic structured. In an era when AI systems are increasingly your thinking partners, the people who can articulate problems with the precision of a function signature are the ones who get useful answers.
The Six Steps
- Define the function. What is the actual decision? What goes in, what comes out, what is the bounded scope?
- Inspect the inputs. What information do you have, what is missing, and what are you assuming?
- Run the dry test. Walk through the logic before committing — find the failures cheaply.
- Refactor the question. If the answer is hard to compute, the question is usually shaped wrong.
- Ship the smallest decision. Don't optimize for the whole problem; optimize for the next reversible move.
- Read the logs. What did the outcome tell you about the model you were using? Update.
Who It's For
- Founders and operators who feel they make decisions intuitively but want a repeatable structure.
- Creators and consultants working with AI tools who notice their best output comes from better-framed prompts.
- Leaders managing teams that produce inconsistent decisions and want a shared mental vocabulary.
- Anyone who reads books like Thinking, Fast and Slow or The Pyramid Principle and wants something more operational.
Companion Volume
Think Like Code is paired with Think Like Purpose — a guide for those who feel successful on the surface but directionless inside. Where Code sharpens how you decide, Purpose clarifies why you're deciding at all.
About the Author
Marcelo Cavic (Marcelo Cavicchioli) is a Brazilian-Italian author and entrepreneur. Founder of AISIBLY and author of The Invisible Store. He writes about decision-making, agentic commerce, and the operational systems that make small businesses durable in the AI age.