Ayan Pahwa is a Developer Advocate writing about agentic AI systems and the live web-data layer they run on. Founder of APxTools. Work featured on Hackaday, O'Reilly, and HackerNews.
I put Claude, Grok, and GPT-5.6 in a live debate over how a person should design their life. One model asked another to name a single relationship it had kept for more than two years. It never answered. 85 turns, $0.90, one open question.
C.H.A.R.T.E.R. is a fail-closed standard for governing a fleet of AI agents: one small file per agent lists every model, tool, host, and limit it may use, and the loader that runs it is the only door.
The full picture of my agentic coding setup: how I structured a four-agent team, what habits hold it together, and the reasoning behind every decision that survived real use.
From scattered containers to a proper self-hosted setup: hardware choices, the double NAT problem, and VLAN network design — how to build a homelab that actually keeps running.
The rules I actually follow when working with AI agents — where things stand today, and why some of this will change.
A personal content aggregator for YouTube and RSS feeds with no recommendations, no tracking, no algorithm. Just the channels you follow.
GPG has protected sensitive communication for decades. YubiGPG is an open-source toolkit that makes hardware-backed key setup reliable enough for everyone to do it right.
On closing the gap between intent and output when working with AI agents — and what it means for how we hire, build, and encode our values into the tools we use.
Building a motorised 3D printed turntable using Adafruit M4 Feather and DC motor FeatherWing to create smooth 360° showcase videos of 3D prints.
A weekend project: 3D printing an owl tea light with programmable NeoPixel LEDs, controlled by Adafruit Gemma M0 and CircuitPython with capacitive touch input for color cycling.
How to use a Raspberry Pi as an SWD programmer with OpenOCD to flash the CircuitPython UF2 bootloader onto a Particle Xenon (Nordic NRF52840) board.
Using CircuitPython with an ESP32 co-processor to build an internet-connected conference badge (PyBadge) with MQTT-controlled name display and NeoPixel RGB color picker via Adafruit IO.
The clean way to set up a Raspberry Pi headless — drop a wpa_supplicant.conf and an empty ssh file on the boot partition to enable WiFi and SSH before the first boot, no monitor needed.
A practical guide to managing project dependencies with Git submodules and Google's Repo tool, plus bonus advanced concepts — git remotes and cherry-picking for multi-developer open source workflows.
Using embedded Linux in commercial products: SoC selection, the Yocto Project build system, cross-compilation, and system architecture — from my talk at the ILUG-Delhi meetup.
Founding KnifeEDGE, a community RC aeromodelling club: how the inaugural meetup at Gautam Buddha University brought 20 pilots together to build, fly, and crash model aircraft.
Building iBow-T, a wearable OLED bow-tie conference badge using Arduino Pro Mini and SSD1306 display over I2C — a demo project for the CodeWear wearable electronics platform.
A review of 'Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1' by Ty Audronis — covering application-specific drone design for follow-me carts and autonomous RC vehicles.
Smart Christmas lights with Neopixel addressable LEDs, MQTT control, Alexa voice commands, and a live Raspberry Pi camera feed — all built on ESP8266 and open-sourced under MIT.
Comparing MQTT, CoAP, and Bluetooth Low Energy for IoT communication — a guide to choosing the right protocol for constrained devices, from Open Source For You Magazine.
Recapping my PyCon India 2017 talk on getting started with embedded Python using MicroPython and CircuitPython, including a live Arc Reactor demo that got the room going.
Hands-on review of the ESP8266-based WiFi deauthentication device with OLED display — covering beacon flood attacks, deauth range, and build quality issues found on the Tindie unit.
Reverse engineering a Syska smart LED bulb by sniffing unencrypted BLE packets with Wireshark and Android HCI logs, then replicating the RGB control protocol using Linux Bluez tools (CVE-2017-18642).
IoT security best practices for developers and startups — covering the do's and don'ts of securing connected devices, originally published as a guest blog on Mentor Graphics.
Getting started with MicroPython on ESP8266 NodeMCU: running Python in a serial REPL on a microcontroller, as written for Open Source For You Magazine.
An automated solar-powered plant watering system using soil moisture sensors, Arduino, and a servo motor — as published in Electronics For You Magazine, February 2016.
Selected as a top-15 participant in Element14's Enchanted Objects Design Challenge with a smart wardrobe concept that suggests weather-appropriate clothing using IoT and text-to-speech APIs.
Building RC foam airplanes inspired by FliteTest using locally-sourced Bio Foam, with a custom Arduino NRF24L01 remote controller designed from scratch when commercial options didn't fit.