I am hospitalized with a high-risk pregnancy. Here’s how running a startup is going.
Last week, I launched my new product from my hospital room in the antepartum unit.
Ayman Nadeem
Programming Languages, Static Analysis, Mathematics, Functional Programming, Haskell, Developer Tools, HCI, criminally bad puns.
Latest posts
Vibe coding to Chomksy: will linguistics pop off in a world full of prompting?
Like many developers, I’ve spent most of the past year vibe coding. Across the many tools I’ve tried, my workflow looks something like this: I prompt AI agents in natural-language and hope they make the edits I want. When it works, it feels like sorcery. When it fails, I’m left spelunking through probabilistic misfires, trying to reverse-engineer why the model chose a broken string-replace instead…
Grammar Aligned Decoding: the good and bad
LLMs continue to push the boundaries of content generation, but they can struggle when the output needs to follow very strict rules, like writing code, generating formulas, or creating markup languages (like JSON or HTML). This begs the question: how do we generate highly structured outputs that are both grammatically correct and also contextually meaningful?
Abstracting Denotational Interpreters: A Summary
I’ve been diving back into static analysis and programming language theory after a 4 year hiatus. Getting re-acquainted with papers in the field has been humbling, and can feel like solving a puzzle with infinite pieces. Writing and summarizing helps me make sense of it all, so I wanted to share my thoughts on a new paper I just read: “Abstracting Denotational Interpreters” by Graf, Peyton Jones,…
How I lied to myself for 10 months—and why I finally pivoted.
During YC, the group partners’ constant refrain about remaining intellectually honest and prioritizing customers needs seemed almost redundant. Yet I fell into the very trap they had repeatedly warned against—a humbling reminder that even the clearest advice can’t immunize us against our own blind spots.
The Cognitive Impact of AI Coding
I started using Copilot as a GitHub employee when it first emerged, long before it was available publicly. I found myself skeptical. The early versions felt noisy and distracting—auto-complete suggestions caused more interruption than inspiration. The user experience fundamentally scattered my attention and focus, something that was not only difficult for my attention deficit mind to sustain, but…
AI Governance Alone Won’t Save Us
On October 30, 2023, while President Biden issued the Executive Order to create AI safeguards, I spoke on a panel for the Practicing Law Institute (PLI) conference, Online Platforms and Popular Technologies 2023: Legal and Regulatory Responses to Technology Innovations and Uses.
Network Security for Paranoid Ovaries
At this point, it is well known that the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe v. Wade introduces new digital surveillance risks. Protecting oneself in the age of surveillance capitalism has become increasingly relevant in recent years, but the removal of the constitutional right to abortion creates new implications. Since online data is frequently used as legal evidence to implicate individuals in…
Human-Centered Approach to Static-Analysis-Driven Developer Tools
This article was published in the Communications of the ACM and in the ACM Queue issue on static analysis.
Using Benford’s law to understand code regularity and detect malware
This is a rough outline of an idea I am experimenting with.