Your Mac mini costs $1.35 a month, and no cloud provider comes close
I was about to build a feature. Then I did the arithmetic.
Harshal Gajjar / blog
Notes and essays by Harshal Gajjar — Agentic AI, cycling, caving, Mathematica.
Latest posts
Wasn't AI supposed to make things efficient and hence cheaper?
Given a tool that lowers the cost of building, companies didn't clean the mess. They shipped more mess and raised the price.
We translated Git instead of hiding it
Git isn't hard because it's powerful. It's hard because of its vocabulary. So we built a phrasebook, not a Save button.
The Last Thing for Humanity to Do
AI made doing free, then deciding. The scarcity keeps climbing — and it's not clear the last rung stays ours.
The blank box problem
The chat-vs-UI divide isn't about interfaces. It's about who holds the model of the task.
The phone is the terminal now
When agents do the work, the laptop stops being the bottleneck.
reminal — SSH without the gymnastics
A zero-config way to reach your own machine. One command, scan a QR code, you're in.
Why do we need evals when AI reviews exist?
The distinction isn't human vs. machine. It's what gets inspected.
What LLMs reveal about language
We built them on the info-transfer view of language. The places they feel hollow tell us what that view missed.
Tesla insurance as a game-theory patch
When you can't make the car aggressive, change the other driver's payoff matrix.
Harnesses, not agents
What "agentic AI" actually ships in the wild.
back from a TAG weekend
back from a TAG weekend. neversink in the rain — 162 ft of free hang, water sheeting down the cliff face the whole descent. nothing else in the week feels heavy after that.
Reading my own notes from Vipassana
I sat a 10-day silent retreat in 2025. I came home and wrote nothing for a week, and then I wrote too much, and then I forgot most of it.
8+ years into Mathematica and I still find a built-in I didn't know…
8+ years into Mathematica and I still find a built-in I didn't know about every week. the language is fractal — there's always one more layer of "wait, that's a single function?"
The pivot is the product decision
Notes from leading the Shram pivot, written down so I don't forget.
old la honda → west alpine → pescadero loop
old la honda → west alpine → pescadero loop. 78 mi, 6500 ft. the descent off haskins is the closest a road gets to feeling like a pipe.
What "forward-deployed" actually means
A forward-deployed engineer is not a consultant. The job isn't to draw an architecture diagram and leave. The job is to embed in a customer's codebase, ship the thing that has to ship this quarter, and walk out leaving behind code their engineers will not delete the day you leave.
reading: "The Beginning of Infinity" (deutsch, again), "Designing…
reading: "The Beginning of Infinity" (deutsch, again), "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" (kleppmann, for the third time), and the SWE-bench papers. one book per attention budget.
Sixteen years of writing code
Today I'm sixteen years into writing code. The first program ran in Visual Studio in 2010. I was thirteen. It printed a number and felt like a magic trick.
first trip into Guardian with the SFBC grotto
first trip into Guardian with the SFBC grotto. tight breakdown, then it opens into a room you don't expect from the entrance. cave geometry is the best argument against intuition i've ever found.