I advice 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 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: ...
Over dinner with Nishka, we were trying to deploy a website. The challenge was: How can we deploy this website, just on mobile, without getting up from the dinner table? STEP 1: Hosting. On my phone, I dictated to ChatGPT (whose transcription is excellent), copy-pasted that to Gemini (which is faster): I want to publish specifically a static HTML web page on my own domain. I want the easiest way that I can host it, preferably just by copy-pasting from my mobile without needing to muck around with Git and the likes of it. What are the most robust, reliable hosting providers that I could use? I can sort out the domain name myself as long as they support an option to map a custom domain name to them. Ideally, I am looking for something that is free, preferably free forever. ...
My wife’s sambar tastes different from my mother’s. And mine, too. When I cooked as a bachelor, my neighbour would pop by, taste the sambar, and exclaim, “Rasam super!” Surbhi’s Day 5 of the 30-day challenge was about Sambar which inspired me to take her dataset and create a decision tree for which state a sambar recipe is from based on its ingredients. ChatGPT started with 68 recipes and built a tree at 41% accuracy. As we added more recipes: ...
In Panchayat Season 1 Episode 7 Ladka Tez Hai Lekin…, at around 17:00, Pradhan asks Abhishek to solve problem 42. 42. A takes 5 days more than B to do a certain job and 9 days more than C. A and B together can do the job in the same time as C. How many days would A take to do it? (a) 16 days (b) 18 days (c) 15 days (d) 20 days The correct answer is (c) 15 days. But interestingly, ChatGPT got it wrong the first time too. It said (a) 15 days instead of (c) 15 days, and required a fact-check to correct itself. ...
I updated my AI Advice page by: Transcribing my calls in the last 2 months (Gemini 3.1 Pro, “Transcribe this call recording…”) Extracting AI advice (Gemini 3 Flash, “Summarize ALL AI-related advice … into 1-sentence bullets”) Asking Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to document what’s new / changed. I added this request: But, and this is IMPORTANT, analyze my original writing style, write it exactly in that style, and then verify to make sure it follows the same style (correcting where required.) ...
For a typical GDPVal style task, humans take ~7 hours and the brain consumes ~135 Wh. Frontier LLM agents spend 50-500 Wh. So, we may already be 3x more or less efficient than the brain. Roughly in the same ballbark! ...
I use ChatGPT to recommend which restaurant I should eat at and what food I should eat. So often that I decided to share a profile of my eating preferences. But rather than think about it and type it myself, I asked it to Efficiently interview me to identify my food preferences. Document it for AI agents to help me pick restaurants. Plan like an expert. ...
Increasingly, I’m using Codex (or other AI coding agents) as the “operating system” to run programs. That is, rather than directly run programs, I have the coding agent run the program. Advantage: If the program breaks, or needs a configuration change, the coding agent debugs it and fixes it. I don’t need to do anything. This is particularly useful for installation. For example: Install demucs and run it against my music folder. ...
The natural capability of Generative AI is to generate stuff - and Gemini’s particularly good with media. For example, we can take any document, like this MasterCard report on The State of Open Finance 2026, and generate videos, podcasts, sketchnotes, songs, and more from it. How? I uploaded the PDF to NotebookLM and created a 20-minute podcast by clicking on Generate Audio Overview - Deep Dive - English - Default. Listen to the English podcast It supports multiple languages, so I generated a Chinese and Filipino version as well. ...
This is surprising because… well, we’re just sitting and the vehicle’s doing the work, right? But: Vehicles accelerate, brake, bump, turn, vibrate, … and our muscles micro-adjust continously so we sit upright. Over hours hours, that’s a lot of energy. We feel like we’re still. But the inner-ear fluids, eyes, etc. constantly get feedback about motion. That mentally drains us (and causes motion sickness). Noise from vehicles, traffic, … triggers cortisol, a stress hormone. That drains us. Sitting in one place restricts blood flow and it pools in our legs, making the heart work harder. In flights, the air pressure is low, lowering oxygen levels. The dehydration thickens our blood, making pumping harder. What helps is: ...
I have a bunch of coding agent skills I’ve accumulated over the last few months. Here’s how often my sessions use them: Skill Claude Codex Copilot Overall code 6.1% 69.1% 37.5% 51.5% data-story 48.7% 16.4% 37.5% 28.0% data-analysis 2.6% 35.2% 7.8% 21.8% design 25.5% 23.6% 14.1% 21.8% plan 8.5% 11.8% 14.1% 11.8% agent-friendly-cli 3.7% 13.8% 11.1% 11.2% devtools 20.4% 7.3% 9.4% 10.0% llm 2.5% 8.7% 7.8% 7.4% pdf 0.0% 7.9% 7.8% 6.6% linkedin-cdp 14.3% 0.0% 5.6% 5.3% uv-uvx 0.0% 9.5% 0.0% 4.9% interactive-storytelling 7.1% 2.7% 7.1% 4.6% demos 8.5% 2.8% 1.6% 3.5% cloudflare 0.0% 4.3% 3.1% 3.3% melt-mlt 0.0% 2.5% 1.6% 1.8% vector-art 2.5% 2.4% 0.0% 1.7% vitest-dom 0.0% 2.2% 0.0% 1.4% memorable-explanations 2.6% 1.6% 0.0% 1.3% npm-packages 0.0% 0.6% 0.0% 0.3% Here are my observations, with surprises highlighted as ⁉️ ...
I use this prompt to generate sketchnotes on Gemini: Draw this as a visually rich, intricately detailed, colorful, and funny, sketchnote. Below that, I paste (or attach) whatever content I want it to draw. I also turn on “Create Images” and switch the model to “Pro” (for better thinking.) Here are some examples of how to use it. Summarize articles. Pick email, report, news, or website. Here’s a sketchnote for this article: How to use AI for research. I used the prompt above and pasted the article text. ...
To teach a mindshift change like AI adoption, I’ve tried to: Workshop: get them to do it. “Let’s try something. Can you share your screen?” Live-code: show them how. “I’ll share screens and tyep this.” Demo: show what’s possible. “Here’s what I built.” Talk: explain it. “Here’s something we can build.” Interview: ask them about it. “What do you think?” Listen: let them yap. The most effective are on top. ...
Lyria (Gemini’s new “Create Song” feature) is helping me in new ways. Earlier this week, it created a jingle for my talk. Yesterday I ran an AI Workshop for IAS officers. As part of that, I asked Gemini: Create a soulful vote of thanks (with patriotic Indian music playing in the background) naming each of these people. … and listed each person in the workshop. The song began… (Listen to the song) … with these lyrics: ...
I deliver about 3-5 talks a month and usually prepare for them. Thanks to AI (but even otherwise), I have a steady stream of new content. So, I just to assemble the story. For example, in my TEDx Whitefield talk “Prisoners of Birth”, I shared the impact of name, gender, lineage, place, and time of birth. I didn’t execute any new analysis. I just cherry-picked disparate analyses into a theme. (Took me three days to plan, though.) ...