S Anand

I used pi to create a compact home page for media.s-anand.net using these prompts: Create index.html - a simple, elegant page that says that this page (media.s-anand.net) serves large media files for Anand - that’s where they should look instead. … followed by: Skip the part that says “Please visit …” … then: Shorten index.html to just 2-3 elegant rules of CSS. I want it MUCH smaller and simpler. … and finally: Center vertically and horizontally. ...

I wrote about my changing AI opinions. At least some of this is because the industry is moving so fast that the bottlenecks keep shifting. Here are four examples of how we AI couldn’t do something (the bottleneck), but that became possible, and the bottleneck shifted - changing the way we work. It’s good to keep this in mind when thinking about AI. Coding: “It can’t write useful code. We can’t get real help.” But in Sep 2022: GitHub finds Copilot developers are 55% faster. “It writes code but doesn’t know our codebase. We can’t let it touch real projects.” But in Feb 2024: Gemini 1.5 Pro has 1M-token context ~ 30K LOC". Cursor indexes code. “It understands the repo but can’t ship a fix on its own. We can’t hand it a whole issue.” But in Mar 2024: Devin solves 14% of SWE-bench - up from 2%.. Verified SWE-Bench is now 70%+. “It ships fixes, but we can’t review them fast enough or trust they’re stable.” Oct 2024: DORA 2024 finds AI hurt both throughput and stability. Now: Sep 2025: DORA 2025 finds is positive but stability stayed negative. Now: Jul 2025: METR’s RCT finds experienced devs 19% slower. Agents ...

On the Indigo 1026 from Singapore to Chennai, I saw a passenger two seats in front of me watch videos in an interesting way. She had wrapped her phone in a plastic cover, wedged it behind the tray table so that it would appear at a comfortable viewing position, and watched an Asian movie (presumably with bluetooth headphones). At first, I wondered if she travels with a plastic wrapper for this purpose. Then I realized it was from the Indigo safety instructions kit. ...

I asked Claude about my AI opinions. Based on my transcripts and blog posts, find the three claims I make most consistently, the three I’ve quietly reversed, and the one assumption I’ve never questioned but everything depends on. Here are things I’ve changed my opinion on: THEN: One frontier model will win - not specialization. NOW: Gemini for media, Claude for strategy/style, GPT for rigor. SLMs as tools. THEN: Carefully curate my course content. NOW: Give students prompts directly. THEN: Web apps are differentiated artifacts. NOW: HTML is easier to generate than PPT - a signal of slop, not craft. THEN: Human in the loop. NOW: Human NOT in the loop, bottlenecking it. On-the-loop, etc. is fine. THEN: Minimal single-agent loop, avoid sub-agents" NOW: Multi-agent, sub-agent, and agent teams. THEN: Avoid MCP, prefer SKILLS.md. NOW: Use MCP because integrating with Claude / ChatGPT / … is easy. There are the top contradictions in my opinions. ...

It 9:30 pm, I checked my calendar for tomorrow’s appointments, alt-tabbed frantically into ChatGPT, and started typing: Tomorrow is my 24th anniversary. It’s a bit late for me to buy anything (except maybe an online service) or prepare something. This has become a habit – leaving things to the last minute and asking ChatGPT to save my day. I did give it good context, though. You remember the OCBC expenses treemap you created by analyzing my transactions? That will give you a good guessable idea of the kinds of things she spends on and hopefully, therefore, what she likes. ...

Dharmendra Singh shared how they built an app with AI. That’s normal. I’m just thrilled they used client transcripts as the source. Basically, they converted the “voice of the client” to working software. To quote them: “A strong spoken business narrative can be converted into a usable product brief quickly when the capture step is disciplined.” You know what this means? Interviewing is a skill to hire for. Better questions = better answers = better apps. ...

I ran npx -y ccusage monthly --compact to get the following break-up of my AI coding agent costs. Month Codex Claude 2025-09 $37.47 $2.29 2025-10 $106.79 $9.13 2025-11 $100.35 $14.24 2025-12 $240.69 $24.88 2026-01 $100.89 $20.28 2026-02 $323.21 $29.46 2026-03 $1996.32 $134.87 2026-04 $401.36 $47.07 2026-05 $378.20 $45.13 This shows the ROI of my $20 subscriptions to each. I get ~$35 worth of API calls for my $20 Claude Pro subscription and ~$400 of API calls for my $20 ChatGPT Plus subscription (on top of my ChatGPT chats.) ...

My post “Add a Verify Button” has a problem. When Rohit requested hyperlocal news for every PIN code in Mumbai, we’d need a “verify” button on every Statoistics card - hundreds of PIN codes, every day. Verifying every output introduces new bottleneck: a person inspecting every unit. That’s 100% inspection - which you do when you don’t yet trust the process. Manufacturing solved this a century ago. At Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works (famous for the Hawthorne Effect), quality control meant inspecting finished products and pulling the defective ones. Walter Shewhart sent his boss a one-page memo; about a third of it was a control chart. ...

Rohit Saran looked at the Statoistics cards my AI agents are generating for The Times of India, and asked about a small button under each one. In the list of Statoistics that you had put, I saw there’s a button called ‘Verify.’ What was that meant to be or will do in future? That verify button explains the claim, mentions the sources, and shows how to check the claim. One card said “9 in 10 Indians want a family doctor and barely 1 in 35 has one”. The button breaks that down: ...

I’m doing one extra push-up every day. One of my 2026 goals is to build muscles. I haven’t done anything about it until May. This month, I figured I would do the absolute minimum, at least to get started, because I seem to have starting trouble more than anything else. I asked ChatGPT: I want to build muscles. What’s the most effective thing that I can do that would take no more than one minute that I can practice every day without any equipment and I can do this anywhere and will have the most impact on building muscles? Research, give me the top five options and recommend one for me. ...