How I do things

This weekend, two people asked me, roughly “How do I use AI better?” This is a frequently asked questions. I document my FAQs, e.g. time management, career advice, etc. and it was time to add AI advice to this list. I often record online calls and transcribe them. I asked Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT for the best way to summarize 400 transcripts of ~40K each. Claude’s suggestion was the best: Use Gemini Flash (1M context, dirt cheap) to process calls in batches of 20-25 Each batch → extract advice themes Aggregate batch results with Claude Sonnet for final synthesis But I ignored it because it was too much work. (See my AI advice: “Ask for easier output”) ...

I ordered a Caramel Cashew Cookie - Soft & Chewy at the Chennai airport, an hour before my flight. I’ve had cookies before, but not heated. The person at the counter put it in the microwave for 30 seconds before handing it to me. It was the best discovery I made in Jan 2026! It is crumbly. It is chewy. It melts. It soaks. It bends when you pick it up. It’s warm. It’s sweet. It’s nutty. It’s gooey. Oh, I could go on. It’s heavenly. ...

As a teenager, I asked my mother “What is the aim of life?” She said, “To be happy and to make others happy.” This was my gospel for a decade. It made sense. It even aligned with my name (Anand = happiness). In my twenties, I was confused that happiness has tradeoffs, like: Long term (study hard) vs short term (party hard) Self (e.g. save diligently) vs others (gift generously) Getting what we like (e.g. favorite food, ambitiousness) vs liking what we get (e.g. any food, gratitude, lower standards) Outcome (e.g. wealth) vs process (e.g. enjoying work) By my thirties, I felt happiness is the intersection of pleasure and meaning. So I tried to be aware of and balance both. ...

It’s incredible how hostile LinkedIn is for reading / writing content. Posts containing links to external websites (like my blog) get significantly less reach. That’s why you see links in comments, not the post! You can’t copy content from posts on their mobile app. You can’t even easily select the entire article on the web app! Selecting a part, and then shift-clicking elsewhere (which works almost everywhere) doesn’t work. Also, the copied text isn’t clean. It’s filled with hidden text (e.g. “Skip to search”), duplicated text (e.g. author name repeated), and other junk. It’s hard to export content. For example, the export feature does not include the original links in your articles, nor the links to images you posted! It’s hard to scrape content. LinkedIn actively tries to prevent scraping, and their TOS prohibits it. No formatting. You have to embed unicode characters. Search is terrible. You can’t search for posts by keyword, date, or author easily. No public posting - so you need to log in to read anything. ...

I have this feeling that the skills we need for the AI era might be found in video games. (Actually, no. I just want an excuse to play games. Self-improvement is a bonus.) I asked the usual LLMs (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT): What are mobile phone games that have been consistently proven to be educational, instructive or skill/mental muscle building on the one hand, and also entertaining, engaging and popular on the other? ...

I read The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, written in Randall Munroe’s style. Here is the conversation. I began with the prompt: Rewrite the first chapter Primo Levi’s The Periodic table in the style of Randall Munroe. Same content, but as if Primo Levi had written it in Randall Munroe’s style. After that, for each chapter, I prompted: Continue! Same depth, same style. ...

Q: “How do we learn what we can do with AI agents?” Me: “Ask them!” I mean, they are probably aware of their abilities. They can search online for how other people are using them. They have access to tools (connect to GMail, write & run code, etc.) which they’re aware of, and even if not, can try out. Asking them seems a useful way of figuring out how to use them. ...

I track my yearly goals by publishing and emailing them to my contacts: My year in 2020 My year in 2021 My year in 2022 My year in 2023 My year in 2024 My year in 2025 Here are questions people have asked about my goal tracking. How do you know that you have achieved the Better Husband tag? In 2024, she said that I was “definitely worse in 2023 than 2024.” ...

GDPval is a benchmark that compares how well AI does (vs experts without AI) on useful real-world tasks. In several areas, the agents outperform experts. For example, AI beats personal financial advisors, but not accountants and auditors. So I used ChatGPT / Claude to decide where to invest, but am having an accountant file my taxes. That’s a high leverage activity, especially since I might not have hired a personal financial advisor by default, and ChatGPT is certainly better than me (I’m not an expert) at personal financial advice. ...

I’m using AI to read books by: Summarizing. This tells me what the books is about, the key points it makes and the main takeaways. It also helps me decide if I want to dig deeper. Fact-checking. I can find mistakes, alternate perspectives, and biases. That’s a huge win! Re-authoring. I can write it in the style of Malcolm Gladwell, Randall Munroe, Richard Feynman, or anyone else I like. Makes dense prose much more enjoyable. So far, I’ve applied this at different levels - and I’m sure there are more possibilities: ...

TL;DR: Join this Google Group to get my blog updates via email. My blog is over 25 years old. At first, people had to visit it to read it. Then I added an RSS feeds. Then email subscriptions. Then via social media, cross-posting on Twitter, now LinkedIn. The RSS feed remains. But I feel it’s time to bring back email subscriptions. It’s the oldest of the technologies, the most robust, and the one I believe will last the longest. ...

My sandals landed me in trouble twice in December. And that’s not uncommon. Mr Krishnan and I were meeting. He suggested: Good morning. Sunday 07/12/25 breakfast at 09:00 am at the Bangalore Club Residency Road (not far from Koramangala)? … but knowing me, he also added: These clubs are peculiar and may insist on no round necked t-shirt or no open sandals. If you have ideological issues with that, no problem and I will suggest another venue. ...

Here’s the report card for my 2025 goals bingo. Domain Repeat Stretch New People 🟢 Better husband 🔴 Meet all first cousins 🟢 Interview 10 experts 🔴 Live with a stranger Education 🟢 50 books 🟢 Teach 5,000 students 🟢 Run a course only with AI Technology 🟢 20 data stories 🔴 LLM Foundry: 5K MaU 🟢 300 days of GitHub 🔴 Build a robot 🟢 Co-present with an AI Health 🟢 300 days of yoga 🔴 80 heart points/day 🔴 Bike 1,000 km 🟢 Vipassana Wealth 🔴 Buy low 🔴 Beat inflation 5% 🟢 Donate $10K 🔴 Fund a startup The “Education” and “Technology” rows have a BINGO! Repeat goals were easier than new goals were easier than strech goals (no surprise). 11/20 wins means I’m picking realistic and ambitious goals. ...

I read 51 books in 2025 (about the same as in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.) With a difference: I used AI to read 44 of them in the last week of the year. Mind blowing The Ants by Bert Hölldobler. Finally, after 20 years of wanting to read it. It lives up to the hype. Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5) by Brandon Sanderson. The only fiction I’ve taken notes for. (About 500 points.) Life changing (or at least, perspective changing) ...

I have this nagging feeling (maybe you do too?) that it’s cheating and I’m not really learning if it’s so easy. The same voice makes me feel guilty when using coding agents to code or ChatGPT in meetings. I’m telling that voice to relax. I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with. ...

I don’t charge for workshops. Altruism? No: it’s self-interest. “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Andrew Lewis, via Tim O’Reilly, 2010. My workshop process is designed to benefit me first. I pick topics I want to learn, not stuff useful to the audience. Example: I picked DuckDB for my PyCon India 2025 talk to learn it. ...

Here’s how I track trending GitHub repos each week. I run a scheduled script that saves a clean TSV I can scan fast. It uses uvx gtrending to fetch weekly trending repos for: Rust: High-quality system tools. (Anything in Rust seems cool.) Go: Reliable CLI/infra tools. (Like Rust, most Go code seems good.) Python: Most AI/ML stuff TypeScript: Most modern JS codebases JavaScript: Most front-end utilities Shell: Productivity scripts I pipe results through jq to extract: ...

I’ve started vibe shopping, i.e. using ChatGPT to shop for small, daily items and buying without verifying. For example: “A metal rack for the floor: at least 2 ft * 1 ft * 2 ft, small gaps, popular options on Amazon.in.” https://chatgpt.com/share/68d61d68-7040-800c-936b-354749539308 “An optical wired mouse that’s smaller than usual, 4*+, popular, Prime-eligible for Chennai by the weekend on Amazon.in.” https://chatgpt.com/share/68d61e0d-420c-800c-bc71-821b9f9296a9 The best use is when I don’t know the right terms. In this case, the terms were wire rack and mini mouse. ...

Here are the 10 most frequent sites I use (based on Microsoft Edge’s home bar): ChatGPT. It replaced Google as my default knowledge source. I prefer it over Gemini, Claude, etc. because the app has good features (memory from past conversations, code interpreter, strong voice mode, remote MCP on web app, etc.) The OpenAI models have pros and cons, but the app features are ahead of competition. Gmail. It’s my work inbox. Interestingly, I check it more (and respond faster) than social channels (e.g. WhatsApp, Google Chat, LinkedIn). It also doubles up as my task queue. Prime Video. I mainly watch The Mentalist. Totally love Patrick Jane! Google AI Studio. Mostly for transcription. It’s better than Gemini on UI, ability to handle uploads, file-formats, etc. It’s also free (though the data is used for training.) My Talks page. I give 1-1.5 talks a week, mostly on AI/ML topics. I use Marp to render Markdown slides and publish it here. Google Chat. It’s Straive’s social channel. I can’t use it from my phone, so I log in only if I need to check if I missed something. LinkedIn. It’s where I post by default. I don’t use it for networking and only connect with people I’ve met and know well. YouTube. Mostly for movie clips over dinner. I occasionally watch educational content. Playground. LLM Foundry is Straive’s internal gateway to multiple model APIs (I built it). I use it to experiment with models, grab API keys, and demo LLMs to clients. Squoosh. I compress every image, every time. Mostly into WebP (hands-down the best format today), typically lossless with an 8-color palette, or lossy at ~0-10% quality for photos. That’s my current home row. It will change. But the reasons probably won’t: fast, simple, automatable, and practical (for me).

25 years ago, Mr. Krishnan (IAS) amused us with anecdotes of bureaucrats writing meeting minutes before the meeting. This week, I flipped that. I wrote slides after the talk. I call them AfterSlides. Why. I ran a couple of Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions where the audience set the agenda. I learned their interests. They got answers. No slides prepared. How. I okayed recording with the organizers, recorded on my phone, transcribed with Gemini, and asked ChatGPT to generate the AfterSlides. ...