2025

Update: Trended on Page 1 on HN for the whole weekend! Part 2 coming soon! Thanks for all the feedback. Hackernews discussion How local, learnable routers can reduce token overhead, lower costs, and bring structure back to agentic workflows. Modern…

Early computing started with logic gates. We wrote in binary because we could reason about how bits flowed through circuits. As complexity grew, we invented assembly languages to abstract over machine code: still low-level, but easier to manage…

We’re racing toward something. Whether it’s AGI or another false summit, the scale of what we’re building is hard to ignore. There are only a few ways this plays out. 1. We scale current techniques to AGI. The compute, energy, and coordination…

Most software today is basically deaf. You poke at it, and if you’re lucky, it does what you want. But it doesn’t listen. Not really. That’s about to change. Say your product’s ad campaign just blew up. The VP wants a buy‑3‑get‑1‑free promotion…

There’s a belief circulating in AI circles right now that a cleverly written prompt is proprietary gold. That if you can coax the right output from a model, you’ve created something defensible. I get the instinct. When something works, and nobody…

As we create more autonomous tools like @Anthropic Claude Code and @OpenAI Codex, it’s getting more important to understand how to rein in AI that codes on our behalf. Today, devs use AI to write code inside IDEs like @Cursor_ai, but it’s a closed…

What people aren’t talking about yet, surprisingly or maybe not, is how @OpenAI is going to have the most insidiously detailed experiential narrative of human life ever collected at unimaginable scale. There’s a trite saying about the best minds of…

Yesterday’s Signal mishap — where a journalist was mistakenly added to a White House group chat about military planning — wasn’t a technical failure. It was a process failure. Ben Thompson summed it up clearly: “Signal is an open-source project that…

Everyone’s buzzing about “prompt engineering” or “vibe coding” using tools like Cursor or Windsurf to turn text prompts into code. It feels exciting, but it’s fundamentally limited. Why? Because text prompts require massive, precise context to work…

AI reasoning is often misunderstood. We assume that once a model is trained, it simply retrieves knowledge and applies it to solve complex problems — but real intelligence isn’t that simple. When I was building language model-powered workflows at…

We've traditionally thought of programming as carefully translating our ideas line-by-line into code. But what if writing explicit code isn't the endgame, but just an intermediate step? With the recent breakthroughs in LLMs, we're entering a new…

Microsoft recently announced the Majorana-1 quantum processor, hailed as a breakthrough in quantum computing. Media coverage often glosses over the details, so I set out to deepen my understanding by breaking things down step by step: How classical…

We’ve LLM-powered Microsoft VSCode. Engineers now build at speeds that were once unimaginable—with @cursor_ai and @windsurf_ai leading the charge, development is set to redefine what’s possible. We’ve also upgraded Figma with LLM capabilities. Tools…

AI is rewriting the rules of tech dominance, and Mark Zuckerberg is playing a high-stakes game to keep Meta in the fight. Once an unassailable titan of social media, Meta now faces slowing growth, privacy-driven advertising challenges, and fierce…

When people think of a country showcasing its technological might, they might recall the early days of nuclear breakthroughs or iconic space missions. Those were the gold standards of another era. AI foundation models — the kind that can consume as…

Yesterday, I discussed the three pillars of AI sovereignty. Today, I’m diving into the first pillar—hardware fabrication—and examining where India stands in the global AI chip and GPU landscape. Manufacturing technology and process nodes India’s…

AI is becoming a cornerstone of national power. Nations are locked in an escalating AI arms race, as witnessed even this week at the Paris AI summit. But what does it take for a country to secure its future in AI? Is it solely about foundational…

JD Vance’s recent Paris address was less about championing democratic AI, and more a mirror of U.S. companies’ relentless push for fewer regulations. His pledge to “restrict access to all components of the AI stack” is a calculated move to control…

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to build two startups supported by amazing people. In my evolution as a founder, I realized that building a product isn’t just about the “what”: it’s about the “why.” The “why” is driven by a story that…

In the most literal sense, an “end user” is someone who receives a final product. Someone who has no hand in its design or development. But as large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, that dynamic is about to vanish. Regardless of technical…

It is abundantly clear that AI slop is here to stay. We’re in an era of cheap, disposable, shallow content so generic that it barely holds anyone’s attention anymore. Worse, the flood of AI generated slop will only grow, fragmenting our already…

While industry leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei tout that more compute, more data, and ever-lower loss are the keys to AGI, much of this messaging seems designed to generate PR buzz and secure funding rather than address fundamental…

There’s a clamor that AI is going to crash software developer salaries and render them obsolete. Some companies are already saying they won’t hire junior or mid-level engineers this year, or that most of their code is now churned out by AI. But here…

Chaos may be the catalyst that pushes AI to the next level. Ten years ago, I asked a question: Can there be an algorithm for creativity? I defined creativity as “the ability to generate unique and novel explanations for events that can’t be deduced…

For decades, software was built by professionals. Now, a billion people are making it — without realizing they’re developers. Casual developers aren’t engineers. They’re educators automating lesson plans, small business owners tweaking Notion…

When disaster strikes, AI won’t ask who deserves to be saved. It’ll ask: who paid for priority access? There’s an old machine learning story: the U.S. military trained an algorithm to spot enemy tanks. It aced tests but failed in the real world. Why…

When expertise becomes copy-paste, the architecture of civilization will no longer built around humans. It’ll be around the servers and power grids that make infinite intelligence possible. Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent recent essay lays out what…

In the 1970s, people thought synthesizers would kill music. Instead, Kraftwerk made it more human. When Kraftwerk released Autobahn in 1974, critics feared the worst. Here was a band ditching traditional instruments for cold, mechanical synths. Wasn…

We’ve been building AI backwards: training giant models in data centers and squeezing them onto devices. What if the future of AI works the other way around? For years, the AI blueprint has been stuck on repeat: train giant models in billion-dollar…

I'm experimenting with a more social way of writing on Substack. Follow me there for more. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

AI will democratize education, but it may also create a new class divide — where human mentorship and connection becomes the ultimate privilege. Imagine two classrooms in 2035. In one, students absorb lessons from AI tutors: efficient, tireless…

The internet runs on human attention, but AI agents won’t have any. Ads work because people see them: scrolling, clicking, impulse buying. But AI agents don’t get distracted. They parse, compare, and execute, stripping out everything that doesn’t…

In 2025, AI is centralized in the hands of a few western companies that control everything — training data, compute power, access, and distribution. The path to decolonizing AI isn’t just about forcing them to comply with national laws. It’s about…

OpenAI’s dismissal of India’s copyright lawsuit as a “jurisdictional mismatch” reveals a fatal blind spot — India’s case isn’t about payments. It’s about dismantling the neocolonial data economy that fuels AI. OpenAI’s defense hinges on two colonial…

The future of AI isn’t about bigger models; it’s about smarter apps that solve real problems. The winners will understand business pain points better than anyone, AND stay ahead of AI’s rapid shifts. Here are 5 trends I think builders should think…

Innovation isn’t about having the most resources. It’s about reconfiguring what you have under constraints. Karl Marx’s insight from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy feels surprisingly modern: “It is not the…

Forgotten bug reports. Awkward email drafts. Chaotic Slack threads. These aren’t just the digital clutter of our lives. They’re going to be the gold veins that power Big AI’s next gold rush. Consider this — large language models have already been…

I thought customer interviews were about asking the right questions. Turns out, they’re about what you give, not what you get. Early on, I treated customer interviews like a checklist: ask questions, take notes, move on. The result? Shallow insights…

When anyone can create apps as easily as content, software stops being a product. It becomes a language of expression. For decades, apps have been meticulously crafted products designed for broad audiences. But most of life happens in the long tail…

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, a server gulps down electricity. Multiply that by billions of queries, and you begin to see the staggering energy appetite behind AI’s rise. For context, a Google search uses 0.3 Watt-hours of energy. ChatGPT?…

Your buyer doesn’t care about your cool technology. They care about saving money**,** making money**, or** looking good to their boss**.** When I started selling AI-powered products to enterprises, I thought the tech would sell itself. Cutting-edge…

"An AI agent that can be shut down or quietly rewritten isn’t autonomous. It’s just pretending to be.” In 2021, a major AWS outage disrupted countless businesses and tools. Now imagine relying on an AI assistant during that outage — only to find it…

Static product specs are obsolete. They’re relics of a slower, less iterative world, disconnected from the realities of modern product building. Developers figured this out years ago. Instead of writing static documentation, they generate it directly…

The best product managers (PMs) aren’t defined by how much they create — but by how fast they discard wrong hypotheses. AI has fundamentally reshaped product management. Tools like Replit and V0 turn concepts into reality in minutes, removing the…

The US has imposed new restrictions on AI exports, claiming they’ll “protect innovation.” Instead, they’re setting the stage for a global arms race. Blocking advanced AI chips might slow rivals like China down temporarily, but history shows it’s more…

Every startup begins with the same goal: solve an unsolved problem for a specific group of people. But here’s the often-overlooked question: Which group of people should you solve for? Before you can nail product-market fit, you need to find a…

There’s a persistent myth that AI is here to replace human workers. It’s an easy narrative to believe—robots taking over jobs make for sensational headlines. But the truth is more nuanced. AI doesn’t eliminate jobs; it changes them. And that’s where…

Over the years, my interests have centered on technology, society, and how the two intersect. Here are three areas I’m actively exploring: 1. AI and its transformative impact AI is my professional background, and its evolution continues to intrigue…

10 years ago, I built a chatbot called Myra that could handle restaurant recommendations, grocery orders, and even Uber bookings—all through WhatsApp. Excited by its potential, I decided to turn it into a company. Over the next five years, I went on…