Recent content on Home page of Debamitro Chakraborti
A few months ago ‘Loop Engineering’ became a hot topic in the AI agent space. I couldn’t find a compelling reason to add a loop to my agentic AI usage just for the sake of it. Neither did I understand what it really meant. I even made a short video about this. 
 Previous attempts at looping AI 
 Late last year, there was a lot of excitement about Ralph Loops . There was…
I was pretty optimistic about the future of software engineering five months ago , and I still am. Despite my involvement with AI and agents and what not. Here I try to document some examples that justify my optimism. 
 AI coding requires a lot of non-LLM work 
 The first talk I ever saw on AI coding was before Cursor or Claude Code or any tool we know today came out. It was given by Emery…
Around two months ago, I had created a new AI coding agent using another AI coding agent. The results surprised me so much that I had written a post about it . As I had written, I have no intention of continuing to do this. Because there are excellent and mature AI coding agents in the market today. But I kept on improving it until I reached a point where I can use it on existing…
I realized that this, being my personal blog, does not always need to talk about AI and programming. Specially when that’s only a part of my life. So here goes my notes from becoming a dad for the second time. 
 Harder or easier 
 I have heard from multiple people that handling the first kid is the hardest. It matches with my experience as well. I am way more prepared this time, and…
The wait 
 In the last one month or so, OpenClaw went viral. Some people claimed that it was even more viral than ChatGPT. I was a little late to the Claude Code wave, so I wanted to wait this one out as well. When everyone was screaming about how crazy OpenClaw was, I was trying to understand why Claude Code became such a big hit - even with non-technical people. 
 My other reason for…
Yesterday in the morning I created a new AI coding agent, using an existing AI coding agent. It took me an hour, and it worked. This was sort of like creating a mini Claude Code using the existing Claude Code. I still can’t believe it worked. I want to write down why and how I did this. 
 The problem - an old laptop 
 My first laptop was a 2012 MacBook Pro, and it still works. I have…
Last week, a post on X reminded me of my encounters with software code coverage. For a number of years in my professional career, I was required to do something or the other for improving software code coverage. 
 Definition 
 Software code coverage is a metric which is defined as the percentage of source code lines executed by the test cases supplied with it. There is a school of thought…
As promised in my earlier post on the same topic, I have a little more to say. 
 Roles will become more vertical 
 There never was a software engineer role which just involved coding and debugging. Knowing something about the customers or the product or the business was a must. Now that AI makes software engineering applicable to many more areas, we will most likely see…
Since the end of 2022 , AI has been disrupting the world of software engineering. Looking at how 2023, 2024 and 2025 went - there is a lot of discussion about the future of software engineers. Not all of that discussion is hopeful. 
 Being a serial optimist, I wanted to write down my predictions for software engineering in the age of AI.
Here it goes. 
 Software products will grow up…
My last working day at my previous employer was December 13 2024. Tomorrow I complete one year of my journey towards becoming an entrepreneur. 
 Re-cap - why I quit 
 I was not laid off. And it was not going bad for me at my job. In fact, I was at the highest point of my career in chip design software. I quit my job because I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. And I realized that, unlike…
My favorite guidebook of all time is ‘The C Programming Language’ by Kernighan and Ritchie. In the first chapter of the book are the immortal words: 
 
 The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
The first program to write is the same for all languages:
 Print the words ‘hello, world’ 
 I have always believed that a…
The seed 
 It was my friend Frido who planted the seeds of this idea into my brain, by showing me a ‘brainrot IDE’ which had been accepted into YCombinator’s Fall 2025 batch. I tried it out and discovered that, like many other AI-enabled IDEs, it was a forked version of Visual Studio Code a.k.a. VS Code. The only difference was that it was an indirect fork. Its…
Backstory 
 Some years ago in my last job, a lot of us used to exceed disk space quotas. Which sometimes meant getting an email from the IT department asking us to reduce the disk space we were using on a particular hard drive. I guess this is pretty common. I remember I used to wonder what would be a better way to find out what to delete. Of course the standard ‘du -hsc’ command…
I feel everybody who has been a software engineer for more than five years has hit a point where a bunch of people on the team feel that the entire codebase has become unmaintainable. I have always seen this happen on projects which are successful. That’s right - the cleanest code I have ever worked on was a product which had zero customers! 
 This cry of ’let’s rewrite it…
This story started on a Sunday, at the SundAI Club . Which reminds me, I should post about the fun AI hacks I have been part of at this club since the end of December 2024. Another day! 
 The project 
 I wanted to create Fireship -styled videos of my friend Andrew’s AI newsletter . I quickly found out that AI video generation was slighly expensive, and I didn’t want to lose…
In a recent speech , Andrej Karpathy has classified software into three broad categories. I have been thinking a lot about them. Here are my reflections on this topic. 
 Definition 
 
 
 
 Software 1.0 
 Software 2.0 
 Software 3.0 
 
 
 
 
 Needs a step-by-step algorithm, where it is told exactly what to do 
 Can be trained to do tasks which…
It all started with a post on X I made, more than a month ago 
 is anybody doing vibe coding in rust? — DebamitroChakraborti (@debamitro) March 27, 2025 
 Based on the responses, I knew I had to try it out. So I started looking for a project to do. 
 The project 
 A few months ago, I had vibe coded a tiny python project which classified Gmail messages by size .
I decided…
I had been thinking of writing a completely different blog post, but just a while ago I got sidetracked by Andrej Karpathy ’s post on vibe coding at a hackathon . It is a great time to be alive when LLMs are changing technology forever, and one of the most famous researchers in AI is trying it out like the rest of us developers. 
 My vibe coding experience 
 Even before the term was…
Inspired by Harper Reed’s blog post I want to document the way I am using AI. Specifically, large language models or LLMs. 
 What I do 
 I have to confess this first. I am unemployed at the moment, on a planned career break.
So, I have all the time in the world to use any AI tool I want. I can afford to devote additional time
to get familiar with any LLM-based tool. And I am…
After a couple of months of coding using AI prompts, I found two cases where a particular prompt doesn’t work. Maybe they’ll start working sometime soon. Or, it is possible that they work with a different AI coding tool or LLM other than the ones I tried. 
 Case I 
 I have started to use Clerk for user authentication. It is really easy to use, but I have bumped into one small…
Quick intro 
 Here’s an idea that ocurred to me almost a month ago, and something that I have been working on since then. As I have written in an earlier post , I started using AI for programming and haven’t stopped doing that yet. Which means, I am chatting with a tool in English, and the tool is doing everything that constitutes programming 
 
 Writing some code 
…
I just realized that I haven’t blogged in four years, so it will be a while before my blog catches up with me. I feel like I am a different person now… Okay, I’ll get to the topic I was excited to write about. 
 First look 
 The first time I saw AI-assisted software development was a demo of a project called all hands . I was amazed that LLMs (large language models)…
(This is a continuation from my previous blog post .) 
 Re-cap 
 I was trying to read in audio samples from my microphone using Rust’s cpal library. Somehow I couldn’t get 44100 samples per second even though I had verified that the sampling rate was 44100 Hz. I tried various things and nothing seemed to work. 
 More attempts to solve the mystery 
 Attempt 4 
 Cpal…
It all started in the third week of my batch at the Recurse Center, when I got interested in Audio Signal Processing, and signed up for a Coursera course which some people were doing. My biggest goal for the batch was to get better at using Rust. So, I thought I should do the assignments in the course using Rust. Looking for a basic audio library, I found cpal . 
 Playing with cpal 
 A…
I spent most of my working hours in the last six weeks learning about and using the Rust programming language . Here is an account of that. No, I am still nothing more than a beginner in Rust. 
 The opportunity 
 I could spend this time in this fashion by being in a remote batch at the Recurse Center (also known as RC). I learnt a lot by myself, but only because I had the opportunity to…
Background 
 More than a year ago, I was looking for a project which would help me learn the Rust programming language . I like creating small projects from scratch, so I thought of solving a problem I had encountered occasionally at work. C (and C++ as well) doesn’t have a standard way of accessing its data structures programmatically. Some languages have type introspection…
Background 
 I had been seeing videos on YouTube about highly successful people waking up at 4:00 am or 4:30 am or even earlier. About ten days ago I discovered that my neighbour wakes up at 4:00 am every day. That got me thinking - this is a real example in front of me. This can’t be some random stuff from the Internet. I had to dig deeper into this. So I decided to try out waking up…
Learning a new programming language is always a nice way to kick your brain into action. I first experienced this when I tried to learn Lisp by watching some video lectures. It took me months to digest the concepts and I never got around to writing any lisp. But the ideas stayed with me for years. Later on I did learn Clojure and spend some months writing a bit of Clojure and ClojureScript. All…
I just realized that I have been working from home for fifteen months now. Yes, this is due to the Covid-19 pandemic and most people around the world are doing the same thing. But I never thought I would do this. Or, get to do this. 
 Did I ever love going to office? 
 When I first started working I used to think that office time was highly overrated. I wanted flexibility to work from…
I used to love debugging. The tougher the problem, the better I felt after finding out the answer. In my day job I happen to work in a product that has been continuously developed over the last 25 years or so. Anything that has seen so much change is bound to have complex internals, and this one is no exception. There was a time when I would spend days and nights chasing a very hard problem. I…
The Joel Test is quite famous and has inspired many programmers and organizations over the last two decades. I was highly impressed by it when I read it more than a decade ago. Nowadays I tend to think that it needs to be revised. I am not alone. If you search for ‘joel test’ on your search engine you’ll probably see a handful of posts which try to describe a modified version of…
I used to be very passionate about developer productivity for years. I guess I still am. But my outlook and methods have changed a lot. I want to write all this down before I forget it. Yes, my memory is short. 
 Ten years ago 
 I had just joined a medium-sized company from a tiny startup and I immediately began noticing how much my productivity had come down. And I found fault with the…
Today is the last day of my batch - that’s how fast a Mini batch flies by. Let me recap what happened in the last two days 
 Interaction with Recursers 
 I had another great coffee chat where we talked about things like the birdsong recognition contest at Kaggle and how remote participation in RC can be more fun. I also got good questions about security in my homesocial project,…
So now I am at the end of day 3 of this batch - which means more than half is over! A lot has happened that I want to write about, although I have made very little progress on the side projects I planned to work on. Like the previous post, I am organizing this one by theme. 
 Interaction with Recursers 
 This is going really well - again, by my own standards. Yesterday I had a nice long…
Yesterday was the first day of my second mini batch at the Recurse Center . This time I am attending a remote batch, which in itself is a new experience. I had the time to think and plan my time for this batch , since I didn’t have arrange transport or accommodation. I don’t know how much of the plan I am following, but I guess I am not too much off track. 
 Interaction with…
I am going to do my second ever batch at the Recurse Center - yay 😁 !
I will attend the Mini 6 2020 batch from August 10 to 14.
I didn’t think this would ever happen, I am able to do this only because right now it is possible to attend remotely. 
 My first ever batch was Mini 5 2018, and I started this blog at that time (I had a few blogspot.com blogs prior to that).
It was…
Today I saw I had made the same mistake twice in a month. It is a rather harmless-looking mistake in C. 
 I first saw it in 2006, barely a year after I started working as a software engineer. Someone was having a crash only with a 64-bit build. Two people were looking into it and I somehow got involved. A function was returning a pointer to a structure and dereferencing this pointer was…
I had read wonderful things about Clojure many years ago in a blog post series . At that time it seemed very different from the type of programming I used to do at my day job. I had no idea that it could be used for creating any of the software programs I used. 
 StrangeLoop and Alda 
 I attended StrangeLoop for the first time in 2017 - and my mind was blown. I somehow picked up an…
I was thinking about creating social networks for specific purposes, when one day I figured out it would be good to have a social network restricted to my home. I got this idea looking at my son and thinking what he would do on Facebook a few years from now. I have nothing against Facebook or any social network - I think they are all fabulous. I just think that an internet-based social network is…
After a lot of thought and planning I came down to RC for two days, alongwith a fellow Recurser from Boston. 
 Recap 
 In 2018 I did a mini batch at RC and simply loved it! I did not like staying away from my nine-month-old son for five days, though. So I decided against doing another batch for a year or two. 
 NGW 2019 
 I attended Never Graduate Week with my wife (a senior…
( My notes from the final day of RC Mini 5 batch ) 
 8:39 am 
 Today is the last day of my batch. I plan to spend the day exploring some codebases. I don’t want to spend a lot of time writing code today. I might write some fun code, though. 
 11:08 am 
 I tried to read the alda codebase to find out where they specify frequencies of notes. Alda was my first exposure to…
( My notes from the fourth day of RC Mini 5 batch ) 
 9:47 am 
 I started a bit late today, and got delayed by having to skip one subway train because it was soooo crowded. I am beginning to feel that although I have completed most of my work in Clojure, I haven’t done functional programming yet. I have not used any global state, and accomplished everything by calling a series of…
( My notes from the third day of RC Mini 5 batch ) 
 8:19 am 
 I have been reading The Joy of Clojure everyday. I need to find ways to improve my Clojure code. So far I have succeeded in avoiding loops by using recursion. I haven’t been able to operate on lists as a whole yet, and neither have I been able to use things like the continuation-passing-style. I can’t use something…
( My notes from the second day of RC Mini 5 batch ) 
 7:58 am 
 I have been up since 6:30am. Can’t wait to get started with today at RC. I have been thinking about how to process a variable number of characters from a string in Clojure. I keep getting stuck because I still have the C++ while loop code in my head! 
 10:10 am 
 I was the first person in RC today. After nearly…
9:15 am 
 I woke up at my usual time of somewhere-between-6:30-and-7:00. Thanks to my son I don’t need alarms! I headed out after an hour in search of Dr Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. I went to 177A Bleecker St - there was no house with that address. I was helped by an ☂ in my search. I took a photo of the shop at 177. Now I am about to head to RC after a small breakfast. Feeling…
10:57 am 
 I am going to the Recurse Center. Can’t believe it yet. Right now I am sitting in the bus and heading towards Boston’s South Station.
Two years ago my wife did a full batch at RC and that changed her life. It changed my life as well - I became convinced that RC was a “must-do”.
It would not have been possible for me to do a full batch unless I quit my…
I am an entrepreneur, amateur musician, ex-programmer, as well as a husband and a father.
I am interested in applying computer science to solve problems in real life. 
 In December 2024 I quit my job in order to start my entrepreneurial journey. 
 aami ekajan bAngAlI progrAmAr
 
 The HTML code for the above line is 
 <transliterate language='bangla'>aami ekajan bAngAlI…
Note: A number of my projects are open source, so sponsorship helps me continue with them. 
 
 Current 
 
 CodeAgent - a CLI coding agent 
 Lean MD - a minimal markdown viewer and editor
 
 Here are some YouTube live streams on building this 
 
 
 
 Past 
 Not-so-tiny things 
 
 Asimov - a ‘Cursor for writers’ product 
…