S Anand

A podcast host sent me eight questions. Instead of rehearsing answers in my head, I used ChatGPT with Local MCP to read 6 months of call transcripts and find the best examples: Iteration 1: Here are questions I have been asked to answer in a podcast. Help me prepare with examples. For each question, go through my transcripts or emails and find examples relevant to the question and share (for each relevant example) a summary, how it’s relevant, and the relevant verbatim quotes from the transcript. Iteration 2: Mention WHO said it. Emphasize the most important parts. Do a second pass. More examples. Disprove your own hypotheses with evidence to the contrary and retain what remains robust. Iteration 3: Do a third pass. Find more real-life examples. Try and disprove yourself even harder. Share the best examples for what survives - not all. Same format. Iteration 4: Ensure diversity of client examples. For example, in Q2, all three are the same client. Extend to add / replace examples - ideally with better ones. Then I used Claude with examples of my writing style to summarize it in my voice. ...

A colleague told me a near-miss horror story. As Google began deprecating Gemini 2.0, we moved to Gemini 2.5 Pro. But reasoning is enabled by default and cannot be turned off. For our specific problem statement, reasoning was not required. Token costs increased 10x and speeds were 3-4x slower. We moved the client to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, which has reasoning turned off by default and offers much lower latency. ...

I’m making more and more of my content agent-consumable, i.e. easier for ChatGPT, Claude Code, etc. to read, in three ways. One, I export content in an agent-friendly way. Google email, calendar, chat. I use gws to back up into scannable one-line entries. Meet recordings. I back up transcripts and videos (with a compact audio copy). WhatsApp chats that I back up into similar one-liners. Browsing history by exporting my Edge history SQLite database. Daily activities by integrating the above with my command line and commit history. AI conversations by exporting them manually or via bookmarklets. Social media records like LinkedIn invites/conversations, Twitter, Hacker News, Discourse, etc via bookmarklets or scripts. Financial records like bank statements, receipts, payslips, tax filings, utility payments, rentals, property records, investments, insurance, pensions, invoices, credit scores, etc. by exporting them manually. Medical records like tests, prescriptions, doctor visits, etc. by exporting them manually. Personal records like certificates, educational records, CV, passport / visa applications, etc. by exporting them manually. Two, I log / generate more content. For example: ...

On this informal AI psychosis checklist, I score 16/19. “AI psychosis” = an informal label for cases where chatbots seem to amplify delusional or manic thinking – especially in vulnerable users. Why it can happen: ✅ Too human: ELIZA-effect activated. ✅ Too agreeable: Sycophant mode: ON. ✅ Always on: 24/7. No off button. No problem! LOL. ✅ Lonely + late night: 2 a.m. feels like eternity. ✅ Weaker reality checks: Mirror mazes. Conspiracy boards. Vibes over evidence. What research suggests: ...

I advise people that people skills are important in the AI era. Now, I’m using AI to help me with people skills. This morning, I wrote a script to export my WhatsApp conversations this year. That makes it easy to feed it into AI models. Then I used my Local MCP connector and asked Claude: Who are people in my life that most deserve an unreasonable gesture of thanks and what would that be? ...

I’d love for Claude or ChatGPT to answer questions like: What meetings am I not setting up that I really should be? or: Based on my activities since 9 May 2026, what should I blog about? or: Who in my professional life most deserves an unreasonable gesture? From data. My files, emails, calendar, contacts, transcripts, blogs, notes, code, browsing history, logs, random Markdown files I forgot I wrote. Hence, a Local MCP. ...

I’m a man of simple needs. All I want is: when I’m on Google Meet, I turn on captions. I wanted to click a bookmarklet and save those captions into a local Markdown file. (So that an AI agent can guide me from it.) Hence, Google Meet Captions. The code is in gmeetcaptions/. Drag the button to your bookmarks bar. Join a Meet. Turn on captions. Click it. You get a tiny panel with two buttons: Copy and Start Recording. ...

I asked Claude: “What are the most effective and impactful ways you can help me?” One of its ideas was to ask it: What are the three questions this field has not resolved, where the disagreement is substantive and not just semantic? Who represents each position most forcefully? So I posed this question about several subjects. This is a great way to discover the frontiers of knowledge in a field. ...

Everyone needs a tracking URL shortener. Why tracking? I want to know if they opened my email and clicked the link. Why shortener? I want them to know what the link is about. For example, https://r.s-anand.net/edge-remote-debugging.html is so much more meaningful than https://chatgpt.com/share/68528565-0d34-800c-b9ec-6dccca01c24c I’ve used redirection services in the past - like t.co, bit.ly, goo.gl, ow.ly, and others. They tend to vanish, start charging, serve ads, etc. Here’s my solution: use static HTML for redirection. ...

Based on 44 meeting recordings from February to late April 2026, here’s how Straive’s small team (3-6 people at any time, mostly freshers and interns) produce a continuous stream of client-facing demos across topics as diverse as image filtering, geospatial analysis, insurance contract verification, NFL medical scoring, OCR benchmarking, and song similarity clustering — often with a 24–48 hour turnaround from assignment to demo. Here is how the team works: ...