ai-creativity on S Anand

Live Vibe Coding using Others' Ideas

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:51:50 +0530

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.

3:40 pm. Asked Claude for more ideas like Senthil’s. It looked fine and I could read it later, but what if… maybe… I presented these ideas!?
3:45 pm. Ask Gemini to draw the first idea - a Modular Kolam Mat. The results look fantastic!
3:50 pm. Now I’m going ga-ga over the idea. I generate images for 3 more ideas: a growth chart kurta, seed library sari border, and recipe towel.
4:15 pm. Narendra shares a bunch of cool PsychOps design hacks like:
- When lights are dimmed people speak softer. So, dimming lights reduces sound levels in noisy offices.
- Rather than reduce the size of shampoo sachets (which customers and business both hate), include 2 shampoos in one sachet, tearable in the middle.
- Price saches at 95p with a 5p deposit for the sachet - which rag-pickers can collect and return to the retailer.
4:20 pm. Ask Claude for more ideas like Narendra’s. The results are just as fantastic!
4:30 pm. I now have images for his ideas too. Now, I start deleting my more boring links.

In fact, these ideas ended up being so good that the bulk of my talk was just about ideas derived from their work. (I’m obviously a big fan of plagiarism!)

Despite being one of my shortest talks (~10 min), this worked quite well because people value speed and spontaneity. I was obviously demonstrating these and that felt cool.

For many years, I’ve been live-coding on stage. But that requires a lot of preparation.

Vibe-coding makes live-coding a lot faster. I can do it during a client demo. I can do it during a talk.

So, I’m going to listen more to what others are saying (in meetings, conferences, etc.) and live-vibe-code from what they just said. Great way to show-off while learning from others!

26 Mar 2026: On a related note, AI has better product development ideas than humans. Read Serendipity by Design: Evaluating the Impact of Cross-domain Mappings on Human and LLM Creativity

Birthday Sandwich Cake

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:27:16 +0800

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?

It was excited. (It’s always excited. Sycophancy’s bad, but … that’s like puppies … and then you can’t say anything.)

What a fun challenge! Here are some creative ideas using what you have:

It began listing ideas. I was hooked at the very first one.

🎂 “Sandwich Cake” (Smörgåstårta-style, but sweet) Stack several slices of bread into layers, using Nutella, peanut butter, and jam as fillings between each layer. Then “frost” the outside with Nutella (it spreads beautifully like chocolate frosting). Decorate the top with swirls of peanut butter and jam. Slice it like a real cake — it’s surprisingly impressive and delicious.

What a brilliant idea! So, I did exactly that.

Toast 4 slices of bread. Level 2. Bendable, warm, with barely a tinge of crispiness and golden yellow.
Spread strawberry jam and peanut butter. Classic PB&J. But I know a trick from decades of experience: less jam tastes better. So, a very thin layer. Also, the heat made peanut butter more spreadable.
Stack the layers. I made a 4-layer cake, alternating between PB&J.
Frost the outside with Nutella. I warmed it up in the microwave for 20 seconds (I swear - GitHub Copilot auto-completed this part with the exact timing it took me!) and spread it smoothly. I covered the entire cake with a thin layer of Nutella, mostly with a spoon, and a little with my fingers to get into the nooks and crannies. (Then I licked the spoon and fingers, of course.)

The nicest part is that it looks like a real cake. The ridges of spread Nutella did look like frosting.

Any clever way I could write HBD on the sandwich cake using household ingredients like sugar or peanut butter? I mean, how do I get the lettering right without a syringe or something?

Turns out there’s a smart way:

🥄 The Ziplock/Plastic Bag Trick (Best Option). Spoon Nutella or peanut butter into a zip-lock bag (or any plastic bag). Seal it, push the contents to one corner. Snip a tiny corner off — the smaller the snip, the finer the line. Squeeze gently and write slowly.

But unfortunately, I couldn’t find the zip-lock bag. I heated the peanut butter and tried writing with a spoon but messed it up. So, I mixed the peanut butter with the top layer of Nutella, giving it a nutty texture, like nuts sprinkled on the cake.

Next, I have lots of tealight candles. Any clever ideas with that?

… and its second suggestion was:

🌟 Candle Halo Centerpiece Place your birthday cake (or toast stack!) in the center of the table and surround it with a ring of tealights radiating outward. Magical, romantic, and festive all at once.

Brilliant.

I use AI a lot. That’s trained me to think of AI first. Something I’m glad for, because this was my best use of AI ever.

Happy birthday, Dhyeya!

Can AI discover new data visualizations?

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:15:52 +0800

Here’s my talk proposal for VizChitra 2026:

Description

There’s stuff I know AI can do.

Create data visualizations. I just tell it to convert a dataset into a treemap, and it does.
Hallucinate. That’s a fancy word for “make stuff up”. I prefer calling it “creativity”.
Run forever. As long as I have token budget and can summarize the context, it can go on.

What if we combine these? What if we asked it to do research? If infinite monkeys will almost surely produce Shakespeare, how long will it take for the greatest AI to discover a truly novel data visualization that is useful?

This isn’t a talk. It’s an exhibition.

I’m not presenting. My AI monkeys are. They’ll show off what new data visualizations they’ve discovered, given the following constraints:

It’s novel. Check and make sure it’s stuff we haven’t seen before.
It’s useful. It has to reveal insights from data (even a niche kind).
It’s beautiful. Visually striking and engaging.

My role will just be a narrator of their work - since they can’t speak (or… um… )

Actually, my role is an admirer and critic - since they can’t critique themselves (but… actually… )

Well, I’m the person who paid for their tokens and will therefore take credit on stage. So there.

Video

Links:

About the speaker

Anand’s an LLM psychologist @ Straive. He prods AI to understand how it thinks. It prods back, teaching him how HE thinks. He’s ex-IITM, IIMB, INFY, LBS, IBM, BCG & other TLAs. He transcribed every Calvin & Hobbes strip over 7 years. AI does that now in 7 min.