This week, I learned: IITM has launched a 4 year degree in management & data science. “Use AI to replace early-career mentorship: use AI-driven synthetic practice when traditional apprenticeship pathways collapse. AI can generate personalized coaching, replacing the missing junior loop with training environments.” Jack Clark Observability is more than logging. It’s agents watching feeds and signalling insights! The GPT 5.4 prompt guidance is a bit complex, but here’s what it’s broadly saying: (Gemini) It’ll over-complicate answers and front-end design unless you tell it exactly how you want it It’ll keep checking with you or give up (e.g. on errors) unless you tell it otherwise, e.g. with checklists or rules Claude Code supports 32K output tokens by default. Since I generate large data stories, I usually hit this limit and lose an entire session. Setting the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS=64000 (which is the maximum) reduces this problem. Google Workspace CLI lets you run npx -y @googleworkspace/cli as a single unified service for all Google Workspace APIs. It follows agent-friendly CLI practices which I turned into a SKILL.md. I’ve been using mise use -g ubi:owner/repo to install GitHub packages. The ubi backend is now deprecated in favor of the new github backend. This works fine for most repos, with edge cases like jtroo/kanata which still require ubi:jtroo/kanata as of now. On the margin, I’ll likely switch to just as my task runner. Claude With AI now writing almost all of my code, I don’t see much need to format it. Code formatters like ruff, dprint, biome, etc. are not relevant when AI will be reading and writing the code, not humans. I just format the prompts in Markdown. Salt is the duct tape of food ingredients. Lemon juice, vinegar, butter/oil, onion/garlic, etc. are runners-up. Claude Claude’s prompt to import memory from other AI providers doesn’t seem to work with Claude’s free account: “No memories or stored context found.”

STEP 1: I asked Nano Banana 2 (via Gemini Pro) to: Imagine and draw a photo that looks ultra realistic but on a closer look, is physically impossible, and can only exist because images are a 2D projection that we extrapolate into three dimensions. Avoid known / popular illusions or images of this kind, like Escher’s work, and create something truly original. Think and draw CAREFULLY! … six times, followed by “Suggest a name for this”. ...

In my graded assignments students can pick an AI and “Ask AI” any question at the click of a button. It defaults to Google AI Mode, but other models are available. I know who uses which model and their scores in each assignment. I asked Codex to test the hypothesis whether using a specific model helps students perform better. The short answer? Yes. Model choice matters a lot. Across 333 students, here’s how much more/less students score compared with ChatGPT: ...

When I was in class 8 or 9, our English teacher told us a story I’ll never forget. There was a poor farmer who lived in a village. He owed the zamindar (landlord) of the village a lot of money. The zamindar had an eye on his daughter. “Marry your daughter to me, and I’ll forgive your debt,” he said. The farmer was reluctant. “Please, sir, what will the village say about your marrying such a young girl?” he asked. ...

I was watching Vasu while Codex-ing and came across this dialogue: Here’s the dialogue, recorded via ffmpeg, transcribed via AI Studio: మీ నాన్న మిమ్మల్ని పోలీస్ ఆఫీసర్ అవ్వమని అడిగితే అయ్యారా? మీకు ఇష్టం కాబట్టి అయ్యారు. సచిన్ టెండూల్కర్ ని ఇంజనీర్ ని చేయాలని వాళ్ళ నాన్న అనుకుని ఉంటే, ఇండియా ఒక గొప్ప క్రికెటర్ ని మిస్ అయ్యేది. విశ్వనాథ్ ఆనంద్ ని డాక్టర్ ని చేయాలని వాళ్ళ అమ్మ కోరుకుని ఉంటే, ఇండియాకి ఓ గ్రాండ్ మాస్టర్ ఉండేవాడు కాదు. ...

Instead of learning and applying new Codex features, I asked it to analyze my sessions and tell me what I’m under-using. I'd like you to analyze my Codex sessions and help me use Codex better. sessions/ has all my past Codex sessions. Search online for the OpenAI Codex release notes for the latest features Codex has introduced and read them - from whatever source you find them. Then, create a comprehensive catalog of Codex features. Then, analyze my sessions and see which feature I could have used but didn't and make a comprehensive list. Then summarize which features I should be using more, how, what the benefits are, and with examples from my sessions. Document these in one or more Markdown files in this directory. Write scripts as required. Commit as you go. It did a thorough job of listing all the new features and analyzing my gaps. ...

I have a GitHub Education since I teach at IITM. But if I switch back to a free account, how much would I need to pay? I asked Codex (5.3, xhigh): My GITHUB_TOKEN is in .env. Go through my GitHub billing. Ignore the $100 sponsorships I make. Other than that, my current metered usage is $6.71 for Feb 2026 (which is included in my billing plan). $0.35 comes from sanand0/exam and $0.34 from sanand0/blog and so on. That’s coming mostly from “Actions Linux”, occasionally “Actions Storage”. Pick a few of the top repos and tell me what I should do to make the cost zero - or reduce the cost as much as possible. See if there’s a pattern across repos. ...

Kanata might be the most useful tool I can’t find a use for. It’s a cross-platform keyboard mapper. Some cool features: Make any key a modifier. Ctrl, Shift, Alt, etc. are modifiers. But we can make it so that pressing Space + I/J/K/L maps to Up/Left/Down/Right. Chords. You can map any sequence of keys to anything else. For example, Alt + G, then C can type git commit -m"Experimenting" [ENTER]. Ctrl + M, then Down, can reduce the music volume by 10%. Toggles. Double-clicking Caps Lock activates capitalization for the current word, and once you type a non-letter, it turns off. Or double-clicking Ctrl can turn on “gaming mode” where WASD becomes arrow keys, and double-clicking again turns it off. Tap Dance. Double-clicking left-shift can turn on Caps Lock. Triple-clicking turns it off. Quadruple-clicking … … and there’s lots more. ...

My current favorite prompt fragment is the expert lens: Think like an expert. In this context: - What patterns would an expert in this field check / recognize that beginners would miss? - What questions would an expert ask that a beginner would not know to? - What problems / failures would an expert anticipate that beginners may not be aware of? - How would an expert analyze this? At each step, explain what they are looking for and why. When I add this to my questions, if feels a lot smarter. ...

This week, I learned: unidown is a Rust CLI tool that converts Markdown to Unicode characters - useful for LinkedIn. 3 years into Nestle, Sangeeta Talwar (who was selling Maggi soup cubes) took the “Maggi Instant Noodles” (popular in Malaysia), changed it to “2-minutes”, realized that noodles are fun for kids to play with, invented the masala flavor, positioned it as easy for moms, distributed hanging baskets (rodent-safe, brand visibility) at stores, marketed on TV and in stores, etc. Gemini Nano Banana Pro 2 is out. Better text, better instruction following. codespelunker is a fast CLI code search tool. Just run cs for an interactive search. It feels light and fast, like ug. lobste.rs Shadow IT is unpaid R&D, not a security threat. When frustrated marketing or sales teams secretly buy their own software tools and bypass the IT department, traditional companies try to ban them. Transformed companies study them. “Shadow IT” is a highly accurate heat map pointing exactly to where your current systems are failing and where the immediate business value lies. Source: CIO.com, Gartner: Business-Led IT Coding agents have introduced a “Usage” page to check your usage: Claude usage and ChatGPT usage. Both have weekly limits and 5 hour rolling limits - with Codex’s being more generous. This aggregates usage across the coding agents as well. Codex has a separate GitHub Code Review quota separate from this, however.

I recorded a short screen cast of a demo I built. It was ~900KB - way too large to publish as a thumbnail. So I asked ChatGPT: What’s the best equivalent of squoosh.app for WEBM compression? I’m looking for a free modern high-quality online video compressor. There are a few, and they compressed it to a third of its size, but 300KB is still too large. So I attached the original and asked: ...

It’s not every day your daughter turns 20. But it is nearly every day that annoying commitments stop you from doing important things - like buying the birthday cake and candles - especially when my wife is traveling. So, late at night, after useless meetings and well after when shops close, I asked Claude (the most creative of the lot): I have bread, Nutella, peanut butter, jam, and the usual household supplies. How can I celebrate my daughter’s 20th birthday with a birthday cake using stuff like these? Any creative ideas? ...

Recently, I’ve re-used my own writing / transcripts as context to LLMs. For example, I’ve used: My meeting transcripts to answer interview questions My blog posts to write news articles My chat history to extract AI-related advice This repurposing can be used for so many things. For example, before delivering a talk to journalists “Review my Feb 2026 LLM posts and generate a single-sentence, ELI15 high-impact use case for journalists.” gets me list of use cases. Now, all I have to do is show what I did and share how it’s relevant for them, like: ...

This week, I learned: tree-sitter is a fast incremental parser generator. That means you can use it to create a parser for any language that works even if there are errors, e.g. malformed JSON, Python, etc. It’s used by most editors. For example, tree-sitter-python is a fast forgiving Python parser. There are official parsers and community parsers Programming Languages: All popular ones, less popular ones like Ada, Fortran, Lua, Zig, … and even niche / domain-specific languages (Gleam, TLA⁺). Markup & Data Formats: HTML, XML, Markdown, JSON, YAML, TOML, CSV, … Query, Scripting & Config: SQL, GraphQL, Bash, Dockerfile, Regex, Terraform (HCL), … Ligature fonts are nice, but it might not be worth forming a habit out of. Claude Cloudflare introduced Markdown for Agents. This converts websites from HTML to Markdown via Accept: text/markdown for any Cloudflare endpoint which has enabled this feature. This requires a Pro account. Microgrants is a list of microgrants programs - where you can give small amounts of money, e.g. $50 - $1K as well as large fellowships over $100K. This includes student grants, creative & community grants, tech grants, social & policy grants, etc. “Animated web formats are simply video codecs … stripped of their most powerful feature.” A .webm file is likely to compress much better than an animated .webp, etc. Gemini esbuild can compile CSS files to support old browsers, e.g. nested rules, custom properties, etc. Usage: esbuild input.css --target=chrome90 --outfile=output.css. Julia Evans New jargon I learnt: Human-On-The-Loop. Treasure In Treasure Out VS Code’s GitHub Copilot extension supports a github.copilot.chat.commitMessageGeneration.instructions setting that lets you add a [{"text": ...}] or [{"file": "path/to/file.ext"}] prompt to the commit message generation. I’ve pointed this to my git-commit.md custom prompt.

Our brains remember some things better. Explaining that way makes it stick. Here are the eight things, most important first, that help you: Structure explanations memorably: Face. You remember faces before facts. So cast characters: “Imagine you’re a courier carrying a packet.” Prefer archetypes to real names — less baggage, more imagination. Place. You’re reading down a list now — and the top feels more important. That’s spatial wiring. Turn any concept into a map. Use higher, deeper, nearer, inside, … Tale. You read #1 and #2 first because they came first. Your brain built a cause from that sequence. Time creates cause for free. “Because” makes anything believable. Scale. “Two feet tall” lands instantly. “60 cm” forces you to convert. Your brain doesn’t measure — it compares. Give it reference objects, not just numbers. Deliver explanations memorably: ...

Priyanka was ghost-writing an interview request from PC Quest for Ankor. Two questions were a bit technical: Straive combines data engineering, analytics, AI, and content services. At a technical level, how are enterprises stitching these capabilities together architecturally and operationally when addressing complex business problems at scale? GenAI systems tend to behave unpredictably when exposed to real workloads. What engineering patterns, monitoring approaches, or runtime safeguards are becoming essential to maintain reliability, performance, and cost control in production settings? … and she asked if I could review. ...

In Feb 2024, Claude 3 Opus was the best model, at $15/MTok. In Jul 2024, GPT 4o Mini reached that quality at 10% of the price. In Dec 2024, DeepSeek v3 reached that quality at 1% of the price. Video See the interactive version If the price continues to fall 10x every 11-12 months or so (and it has been), then in a year, a Claude 4.6 Opus like model will cost 1/10th of the $5/MTok today, and in 2 years, 1/100th of that. ...

I got an email from Google Cloud on my work account “excited to introduce you to Gemini Enterprise”. Once I signed up, it said, “you have 30 days to try Gemini Enterprise – Business edition at no cost.” After that, it costs US $21/user/month, which I can subscribe to here. The main differences from Gemini Pro (consumer accounts) seem to be: Data Privacy. Google won’t read or use your data to train. (In Pro, you need to turn it off explicitly. Here, it’s the default.) Admin Controls. Admins can turn off connectors, manage users, retention policies, etc. Copyright Indemnification. If AI infringes copyright and you get sued, Google will find the case. But if you’re using Gemini via your Google Workspace account (i.e. your work account already has Pro subscription), then it makes no difference - it’s all the same. ...

High Scepticism + High Humility = Scientist. Editor. Indecisive. “Let’s test it.” Good for high-stakes, irreversible decisions. System 2 thinking is slow and effortful. But if you do this too often or too long, you miss the window or other opportunities. High Scepticism + Low Humility = Critic. Troll. Red Hat. “You are wrong.” Good for stress-testing and auditing. To prevent/anticipate failures. But it’s toxic and demoralizing if you do it too much. ...

I have a bad memory. (I need to write about that. I k eep forgetting to.) It’s worsening. Yesterday, I misplaced my debit card for the first time. Or maybe the second…? Which reminds me, I just forgot a call I have now! (Panic.) (15 min later.) So, anyway, therefore, I log stuff meticulously. Like what I did each day, what I ate, what I weigh, what pained me, etc. But the best logging is automated. My phone logs where I am. My bank logs what I spend. My calendar logs who I meet. ...