Does code matter anymore ?
Code has always been considered as Craft. You could tell “well crafted” code from the alternative just by looking at it. It required time, patience, an opinionated outlook and effort, amongst other things. Developers took pride in their code. Just as an artisan would take pride in theirs. The tools and ecosystem around the craft of coding has evolved and improved making it easier for us to comprehend and maintain larger and more complex codebases.
Session Visualization with Obsidian
When working with coding agents such as Claude, Codex etc. we provide the prompts and context until we get to the final result. However a lot happens behind the scenes. The model constantly makes calls to tools, MCP servers, commands etc until it arrives at the output. By knowing what path it took, we can begin to understand its reasoning better. One way I have found useful is to use pre/post hooks to log these messages into files and then use Obsidian to visualize them.
Challenges in an AI First world
There is an AI race going on. No one knows where or what the finish line is, but it’s a race nevertheless. Run or be left out. So everyone is running. Developers, designers. product managers, companies, countries. To be clear, there was always a race. A race to get products out first, to get features in time etc. But there were guardrails. There were rules. Now, they seem to be absent/de-prioritized. “Move fast and break things” - then fix them even faster with AI !
Learning Rust
I’ve always been curious about the Rust Programming Language. It’s got some very attractive properties like memory safety, no GC pauses and is blazingly fast. Here are some great resources for learning Rust: The Rust Book Rust By Example Rustlings I’ll document my journey on github In the age of LLMs and coding assistants, one may question the utility of this. But I think building familiarity and expertise in something new is absolutely essential, so you can understand better …
How We AI
Have you ever wondered how folks are using AI ? At work or in their personal lives ? AI is changing faster that anyone can keep up. We constantly hear of flamboyant/pie-in-the-sky use cases. But what about the ways it is being used “right now”. Yes it is a great coding and peronal assistant…but “how” exactly are others using it ? Have you ever booked a vacation using AI ? What worked and what did not ? What is your dev setup ?
An MCP server for this blog
Caus, why not ? There are north of 6300 MCP servers out there in the wild ! If you don’t know what MCP is, you can read about it here It’s a way for AI applications(e.g. LLMs, AI Assistants etc) to tie into your own tools, workflows etc. AI Apps do a great job of reasoning / articulating, but it needs data for this. Data that is often siloed, on which it did not train and does not know about.
The killer use case for GenAI
In the next few years, approx $2T will be invested in AI !(For comparison, the entire US economy is around $30T). One of the reasons for this exuberance is that there are probably many many areas in which AI can be applied, in theory. We just may not have found a compelling narrative for them all. One use case which I find personally extremely useful is that of a Personal Assistant(PA). Now a PA can mean very different things to different people. When I speak of a PA, it’s someone who can …
AI and the coming inequality
A lot of focus thus far on AI has been on safety. And rightly so. Safety of any new technology is critical before it should be made available to mass markets. But how about societal inequality? Inequality today is quite stark. The wealthy 1.5% own 48% of the world’s wealth. The fundamental premise of AI is to boost productivity. What happens when rich nations / corporations (who also happen to own the means of producing these models) get boosted productivity by AI ? AI enabling tech will …
Vector DBs for Data Protection
I was reading up some information on vector embeddings recently and started thinking about different use cases of it. One interesting use case was for Data Detection and Response. The thought exercise I had was that if we are able to track data access patters or data lineage and represent them as embeddings, then the embeddings of any anomalous / nefarious access pattern would have very little similarity with other embeddings.
Using External Functions with OpenAI
An easy way to boost the capabilities of AI models is to provide it with external information that it may not have. e.g. maybe your company has some proprietary data that would never be included while training the models. But if you could provide the model with this info during inferencing, it would be able to provide more accurate results. One way of doing that with OpenAI is via function calls. You define a function with all its input parameters and describe what the function does. The model …