Can we not 'skip to the good part'?
There is a song by AJR called "The Good Part" with a line that goes "it's so hard, can we skip to the good part?" In the song it is about life, he is tired of the slow uncertain middle and just wants
Manthan Surkar
Manthan Surkar
Latest posts
The Fast Food Problem with AI Coding
I am about to compare AI-assisted coding (vibe coding in some sense, but not necessarily all forms of it) to fast food. I know that sounds odd, and it is not an obvious parallel. This is not an AI ske
Who Does Hard Things, and Why
People do all kinds of work, some of it is easy and some of it is absurd. What is really interesting is when people do really hard things, ones that have a very low probability of success. These are things like starting startups or doing things that ...
Prompt Smells, Just Like Code
Prompt Smells The term "code smell" was introduced by Kent Beck in the late 1990s. It was meant to capture something deeper than just bugs or technical inaccuracies. Code smells help us identify poor design fundamentals that lead to low-quality code....
AI Agents Under The Hood
Motivation: Why You Should Care Not a day goes by without hearing the term “AI agent.” I have built multiple systems that use AI agents, like patra.app. While building those and reading through a lot of resources, I learned how AI agents actually wor...
Words Don’t Compile
I wrote my first line of code at ten. It was either a small tweak to a WordPress plugin or a little C++ program I copied from a thenewboston video. The exact file is long gone, but the habit stayed. Since 2010 I have kept typing. For years, “writing ...
O1 Models vs. Simple Chain of Thought: What’s the Difference?
OpenAI recently released the O1 model series, which has outperformed on multiple benchmarks (more on this here). But what exactly is going on with these models? Aren’t they just doing basic chain-of-thought reasoning? We’ll try to understand(in very ...