I conducted a session on Sat, 22 Aug 2026 at IIM Alumni Singapore — AI Unboxed (4/4) - Singapore / Teams. Summary: Coding is becoming specification and review: describe the outcome, let agents build it, and focus on whether the result works. Here’s the link to the session Links: Room Map Video (129 min) Transcript Audio (129 min)
Yesterday, I wrote about @syu-toutousai, the bounty-hunting agent ecosystem. That led me to OpenAgents. OpenAgents has plenty of bounty issues: Fix JWT auth middleware accepts algorithm none - $8k Fix rate limiter doesn’t differentiate authenticated vs anonymous limits - $2.2k Add structured error responses with error codes - $8.6k Fix Math.random used for nonce generation - $8k Fix ABI encoding BigInt overflow - $9k Most issues also include a trick requirement. For example, #100 asks contributors to add a @generated-by block with: ...
Yesterday, I submitted a Codex co-authored PR to fix an issue I raised (using ChatGPT and Z3 - so yeah, I used AI to raise the bug and squash the bug!) A few hours later, @syu-toutousai submitted another PR to solve the same issue. @syu-toutousai seems interesting. The user account description says “Autonomous Technical Contributor & AI-Driven Developer” - a bot account. The PR itself was simple and had a few improvements I can think of: ...
At the PyCon SG Education Summit today, Melvin’s lighting talk on “Writing Proofs in Python” began with a subtle bug in this mid-point calculation (often used in binary search or sort) in languages like Java, C/C++, Go, etc. low = ... high = ... mid = (low + high) / 2 Since the integers are fixed-width, this triggers an overflow when low + high exceeds the maximum integer value. Even popular libraries like Pandas had this bug until 2019. In fact, even Python’s native list.sort() had this sort of bug until 2015! Read the details. ...
I sometimes use Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, etc. to record workshops and talks. These record the entire session, including before and after the actual talk, and save it as large MP4 files. I use ffmpeg to trim the video to just the talk, and then compress it for sharing. I’m sharing the options that work for me, discovered by trial-and-error. To trim it, I use the following command: ffmpeg -ss 00:10:00 -to 02:10:00 \ -i "original.mp4" \ -map 0 \ -c copy \ -avoid_negative_ts make_zero \ -movflags +faststart \ new.mp4 Arguments: ...
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.) ...
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 conducted a session on Fri, 15 May 2026 at Gramener All Hands - Remote. Summary: Software is shifting from fixed interfaces and workflows to agents that interpret goals and choose actions dynamically. Products should be designed around delegated outcomes. Here’s the link to the session
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. ...
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. ...
Terence Tao said, “We haven’t done many experiments … large-scale studies where we take a thousand problems and just test them.” So I told Claude: You know my style. Suggest some innovative experiments I could run. The first suggestion was cool! The Polya Audit. Polya’s How to Solve It lists 20 heuristics (work backwards, induction, analogy, etc.). Mathematicians treat these as wisdom. Nobody has ever measured which ones actually work, and on what problem types. ...
Based on several (i.e. two) recommendations, I subscribed to MiniMax. At $10/month, you get 1,500 requests every 5 hours and 15,000 every week. That’s a LOT! Using the same prompt I had Claude Code generate two data stories: The first paragraph, by Claude Sonnet 4.6 The first paragraph, by MiniMax M2.7 Here’s my comparison of the two. It’s partly based on Claude Opus 4.6’s comparison but I felt the same way. ...
Increasingly, I use coding agents instead of writing software. For example, I built a Blog UMAP. Then, I built Calvin UMAP. And more. But instead of building re-usable software, I just ran Claude with prior context. Increasingly, I use coding agents to run software. For example, I use Codex to classify my expense receipts. It writes re-usable code, but I run it using Codex, and it updates the code with new/edge cases. ...
I kept hearing that with the Nov 2025 release of Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 Codex, ex-coders were sprinting back to coding. On a sample of ~1,700 developers on GitHub, exactly ten fit the “dormant returner” profile. Here are a couple of examples: But they’re the exception. I could find only TEN out of 1,700 developers who returned. I also found a few who exited: To be fair, the vibe coding revolution is real, but maybe we are (I am) mis-interpreting it. ...
I spoke today on Design in the Age of Infinite Generativity at the Chennai Design Festival. You can read about the talk in the link about. This post is about my preparation. Tue 10 Mar 2026. Damn! Palani’s asked for the topic. Claude, what should I talk about!? Fri 20 Mar 2026. ChatGPT, tell me who the other speaker are. Fri 20 Mar 2026. Oh, I’ll just pull a bunch of links, use browser tabs as slides, create some slide dividers, and I’m ready! Sat 21 Mar 2026 1:00 pm. I’m NOT ready! The story doesn’t flow. It’s rubbish. Sat 21 Mar 2026 3:00 pm. Let me drop some of the boring ones. I just have 15 minutes. Sat 22 Mar 2026 3:30 pm. Oh, maybe I should listen to what the others are saying, just… you know… … and that proved the best decision ever, because Senthil of Payir showed a re-usable fabric calendar that converts into a bag. It was a fantastic idea, so I got curious. ...
Similar to the embedding map of my blog posts, I created an embedding map of Calvin & Hobbes. It uses the same process as before. Video
I was at a panel on AI in SDLC at PyConf. Here’s the summary of my advice: Process Make AI your entire SDLC loop. Record client calls, feed them to a coding agent to directly build & deploy the solution. Record your prompts, run post-mortems, and distill them into SKILLS.md files for reuse. Prompting Ask AI to make output more reviewable. Don’t waste time reviewing unclear output. Prefer directional feedback (feeling, emotion, intent) over implementational. Also give AI freedom to do things its way. Learn from that - you’ll be surprised. Learning ...
I conducted a session on Wed, 18 Mar 2026 at Straive webinar - Remote. Summary: Autonomous agents are useful only when their actions can be trusted. Constrain workflows, verify intermediate outputs, and design explicit checks before granting autonomy. Here’s the link to the session Links: Download slides Transcript
I created an embedding map of my blog posts. Each point is a blog post. Similar posts are closer to each other. They’re colored by category. I’ve been blogging since 1999 and over time, my posts have evolved. 1999-2005: mostly links. I started by link-blogging 2005-2007: mostly quizzes, how I do things, Excel tips, etc. 2008-2014: mostly coding, how I do things and business realities 2015-2019: mostly nothing 2019-2023: mostly LinkedIn with some data and how I do things 2024-2026: mostly LLMs … and this transition is entirely visible in the embedding space. ...