Thoughts on AI, startups, and life by Namanyay.
pg recently retweeted this from when he posted this last year, which made me check out how much lines of code I ship. I’ve attached a picture below. Only a couple of years ago this would’ve been a good LoC count for a month! Of course, shipping tens of thousands of lines of code is considered the “new normal” these days. I focus on growth as a CEO, so this isn’t something I’d consider very high…
I just got accepted into Y Combinator. It feels like a dream, because their motto is something I’ve been turning over in my head since I was a kid reading Paul Graham’s essays on a CRT monitor. “Make something people want” sounds like simple four words, but it took me 14 years to unravel their deepest meaning.
On the same day that a popular tech YouTuber Theo published a video about how “open source is the future for tech companies”, Cal.com, one of the most impressive open source projects, just went closed source. I’m a fan of Cal.com and I use it every day. Them closing their source code was a bit… sudden and shocking for a lot of people. But I’ve been deep in the AI trenches for over a year now, and…
SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth.1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. I have been writing software for more than half my life. In the last year itself, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and operators in SF, from preseed to Series E companies. AI is bringing an existential threat to…
Confession: I’ve been using Claude Code to write all my code for me. And I think it’s making me worse at the thing I’ve loved doing for twelve years. I can clearly see how AI coding is rewiring our brains – it makes developers crave instant gratification instead of deep understanding, and reduces us to gamblers who pull levers for the next hit of working code. If this is happening to me, someone…
I celebrate another revolution around the great big ball of fire today. This was a big year for me: I founded my first product startup, all solo. I’m doing something really hard but I realize I’ve never written down my guiding principles about why I do this. This article is mostly a reminder for me: on what it takes to achieve greatness. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: Show Original Show Stylized…
Every developer I know has the same frustrating ritual. Open Claude Code or Cursor and ask it to do a task. The AI gives you generic code, sometimes useful (but usually not). You correct it. It apologizes. You explain again, with additional context. Rinse, repeat, until you want to throw your laptop out the window. David Cramer from Sentry recently shared his AI workflow where he maintains manual…
This is part of my “AI in SF” series, where I share real AI engineering workflows from San Francisco startups. I recently interviewed engineers from Parabola (they’re hiring btw, more on that at the end). Here’s a technique to teach AI to learn from your mistakes. You know that feeling when you leave the same code review comment for the third time this month? “Hey, we use relative imports here,…
This is a part of my “AI in SF” series, where I share real AI engineering workflows of SF startups. I recently interviewed an engineer from Pallet (they’re hiring - more on that at the end). Here’s an insight that will make your AI-generated code better. Most developers use Cursor like expensive autocomplete. They let it generate whatever code it wants, fight with inconsistent outputs, and spend…
Social media is full of people showing off their perfect little demo apps claiming AI is revolutionary, meanwhile, AI keeps suggesting fixes for files that don’t exist or rewrites working code into broken messes. Does that sound familiar? Here’s the thing — the “vibe coders” are not wrong about AI being powerful. They’re just not dealing with what you’re dealing with. You’re working on a real…
Reddit discovered the funniest thing in tech this week, and it shows exactly how broken the AI narrative is. The newly released GitHub Copilot agent was given permission to make pull requests on Microsoft’s .NET runtime, and the results couldn’t be funnier. The AI confidently submitted broken code, while human developers patiently explained why it didn’t work. Over and over again, for days.
AI code generation is error-prone. Why, then, are programmers still using it? Everyone from YC partners to Fiverr’s CEO has been proclaiming that “90% of code is AI-generated” or that they’re becoming “AI-first” companies. The subtext they’re forcing on us is clear: programmers who don’t embrace AI will be left behind. But after two years of daily AI coding — from the earliest Cursor version to…
MCPs are a way for AIs to interact with the outside world. An MCP can allow AI to read emails, post tweets, message your friends, and much more. We are used to interacting with the digital world via apps and windows—but MCPs enable an AI to do everything that humans do, without using any apps. Here’s a quick guide on setting up and using your first MCPs in Windows.
You know by now that AI can dramatically speed up your development process (when used correctly.) But the key is knowing how to communicate with the AI properly. Here’s my collection of prompts that actually work in real-world scenarios.
The first time I encountered Big Tech was at age 15 when I won Google Code In. They flew me and my family to San Francisco and showed us around the Googleplex. I arrived with wide eyes, eager to see where the “smartest people in the world” worked. But, what I found… disturbed me. Everyone wore the same badges, slept in nap pods, played the same games, and ate at the same cafeterias. I couldn’t…
Imagine if you could build your own apps and tools just by describing what you want. That’s now possible thanks to new AI tools. This guide will show you how to do it! This guide is specifically for beginners who have never done anything technical before. What We’ll Cover How to turn your ideas into real working apps Which free tools to use Step-by-step instructions for your first project Common…
Is it just me, or are the code generation LLMs we’re all using not that good? For months, I’ve watched developers praise LLMs while silently cleaning up their messes, afraid to admit how much babysitting they actually need. I realized that LLMs don’t actually understand codebases — they’re just sophisticated autocomplete tools (with good marketing.) After two years of frustration watching my AI…
AI is incredibly powerful, but it needs guidelines. “Vibe coding” might work initially, but as the project grows, it creates more mistakes than it solves. After fixing countless AI implementations, I’ve distilled it down to three core principles that actually work. The current wave of AI tools promises to 10x your development speed. What they don’t mention is how they can also 10x your debugging…
I recently moved to NYC since I was accepted by the Recurse Center, and today was my first day at their hub. The day started by nerding out on the retro computers, hardware labs, and 3d printers they have; followed by the first breakfast bagel of my life. I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded out by so many talented programmers and am looking forward to the next three months with my new…
Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized — unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. That’s when I started thinking more about Karpathy’s recent statements on vibe coding. For those who missed it, Andrej Karpathy recently shared his…
Two days ago, my friend Owen messaged me in a panic. He had built an impressive SaaS app using Bolt, but realized that his OpenAI API key was completely exposed. He was fortunate to have caught it early, but what if this had actually went into production? Owen isn’t alone. Unfortunately, AI coding assistants often generate functional but insecure code unless explicitly prompted about security…
As a software engineer experimenting with AI for the past 2 years, I’ve tested nearly every AI coding assistant on the market and developed a workflow that consistently delivers results. Here’s my tried-and-tested method for solo developers looking to leverage AI to make SaaS products.
In 12 years of my dev career, I’ve spent countless hours battling browser bugs. Recently, I discovered an MCP that’s cut my debugging time in half. MCP as a term is being overused too much, but just understand them as APIs that AI agents can use. I found an MCP to let AI see and interact with your browser, called BrowserTools. Once you integrate it with Cursor, you can ask it see what’s going on…
Last week, X exploded when a “vibe coder” announced his SaaS was under attack. His business, built entirely with AI assistance and “zero hand-written code,” was experiencing bypassed subscriptions, maxed-out API keys, and database corruption. His follow-up admission made this notable: “as you know, I’m not technical so this is taking me longer than usual to figure out.” As someone deeply immersed…
Using AI for coding isn’t perfect, but it definitely makes me faster. I’ve been coding with Cursor AI since it was launched now while building my SaaS. The internet seems split between “AI coding is a miracle” and “AI coding is garbage.” Honestly, it’s somewhere in between. Some days Cursor helps me complete tasks in record times. Other days I waste hours fighting its suggestions. After learning…
I’m not sure if I’m ready for what’s coming next with AI. Things are moving too fast. The recent releases of Claude 3.7 and GPT-4.5 were… surprising. I read articles where AI researchers admitted these systems solved problems faster than they could. We’re racing toward a world where humans might not be the smartest ones anymore. And we’re doing it willingly, even eagerly. A year ago, I laughed off…
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it…
A couple of days ago, Cursor went down during the ChatGPT outage. I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s help. After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.
As a content creator in the tech space, I found myself caught in an all-too-familiar trap: endless hours of doomscrolling through social media and news aggregators, trying to stay on top of the latest trends. The signal-to-noise ratio was abysmal—for every meaningful tech development, I had to wade through countless memes, heated arguments, and clickbait. I knew there had to be a better way.
Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed AI will replace mid-level engineers by 2025. As someone building AI developer tools and studying their real-world implementation, I believe this fundamentally misunderstands both the current state of AI and the role of mid-level engineers. Here’s what Meta is missing.
If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link to the article.
If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link. Modern software development is complex. Our projects have hundreds of files, intricate dependencies, and carefully thought-out architectural decisions.
Learning why model redundancy > optimization It started with a frustrating Thursday afternoon. Our code analysis service was hitting rate limits constantly, and I was doing what any reasonable engineer would do: optimizing our token usage, implementing better queuing, and trying to squeeze maximum performance from our chosen model. Nothing worked. Or rather, everything worked a little bit, but not…
Last week, my AI coding assistant generated a perfectly-structured code review suggestion. The format was immaculate - every field properly typed, every attribute carefully specified, the suggestion clear and actionable. There was just one problem: it fundamentally misunderstood how our authentication system worked.
“Every developer has that one post they almost didn’t write…” For 2025, I decided to get back into technical writing. I’ve been obsessing over getting AI to actually understand production code. Not just generate it, but really grok what’s happening in a mature codebase. After countless nights exploring this rabbit hole, I wrote about a breakthrough I had. Sunday morning, I posted it on HackerNews.…
A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer. Here’s what I mean.
Last month, I asked Claude to help refactor a React component. The code it wrote was beautiful - clean, well-documented, following all the best practices. It also quietly broke our error tracking system, removed a crucial race condition check (that admittedly looked like a bug), and duplicated three utility functions with slightly different implementations. Sound familiar? The AI coding space is…
I’ve been running multiple WordPress blogs for my friends and family on my own VPS since ~2012. I didn’t bother checking them for updates, and surprise surprise they all got hacked. This is my journey of how I fixed it and how the latest version of my blog was born. Hmm, this is not what WordPress is supposed to look like is it?
At Metric, my latest accounting AI automation startup, we’ve built complex interconnected pipelines that query an LLM with multiple transactions and invoices. Of course, the entire flow from beginning to end needs to be tested. Given the manual effort of uploading files and the long wait for LLM responses, we had to automate the entire test. In the automation, I found many cases where an initial…
A simple way to implement a “search” feature into your node app is using the database engine to check for presence of tokenized search query. In my case, I’m using MySQL with the Sequelize ORM and needed to add a e-commerce like search form with product results for a client.
Vue loads content asynchronously, which means that Google’s crawlers won’t pick up your site for indexing. That is, until you give them a rendered version to see. We’re going to discuss a common way to serve content properly for crawlers here, called “Prerendering”.
Ghost… I tried. Trust me, I really did. I stuck with you for over 3 years, developed a custom theme on you, hacked around any shortcomings you had. But yesterday, I had to give up. Trying to upgrade from 0.11.x to 1.x had to be one of the most annoying experiences I’ve had recently and enough is enough. It’s not me, it’s you.
I’ve been looking for a free option for instant RSS to email subscriptions, and while Zapier comes close; the free tier does not support the volume or speed that I require.
I don’t know about you guys, but I always have an annoying time trying to figure out how to make Sequelize work — the documentation seems to have a dearth of examples. Here’s a few examples for “common” functionality.
Recently I’ve been noticing a bunch of spam comments all over YouTube — with different text and links, but all leading to one single site: giftcardrebel.co. Why, how, or for what purpose — I have no idea.
Multer makes file uploads via <form enctype="multipart/form-data"></form> really simple. If you’re looking to host user images on your filesystem and are wondering about the best practices involved, here’s what works for me.
A quick way to get a local shopify dev environment going:
I recently presented you with a frequency distribution of CBSE board marks for DPS Vasant Kunj, and now I’m back with an analysis of 4052 CBSE schools across India, with results of over 476898 students.
Update: Check out the analysis done for 4L students across India.
While working on a simple online yearbook for my high school class of ‘16 in Meteor, I ran into the issue of uploading images to Meteor. Turns out, it’s not uncomplicated at all.