Hi! I'm Shreyas. I like trying to understand the world, building things that improve it, and talking about it on the Internet.
I like creating things—essays, websites, scripts, products. Anything which is positive sum, and impactful.
Writing is thinking. It's something I deeply enjoy. 10 years from now, or a 100, It might probably outlive me. This is an attempt at that posterity. I write about what I'm building, what I'm learning, and the ideas I'm exploring:
Work related initiatives across scientific publishing, healthcare, assistive-tech and edutech
AI-assisted coding with Cursor IDE for side quests, experiments and other humanitarian projects
There are moments in life when you hit slow-burn-max mode, when you know a big decision is coming, and you can feel the weight of it. You stop everything else and think deeply about the problem you're about to face. Jeff Bezos calls these “one-way doors.” Most decisions are two-way doors, you can go through, try it out, and walk back if it doesn’t work. But some aren’t like that. They’re...
Some blockbuster software products should just end the cycle of endless iteration. The conversation around product development needs to take seriously the idea of “finished” software, alongside the more common belief that “software is never perfect and always needs improvement.” These are two different schools of thought and have a lot of friction to coexist with each other. I lean toward the...
Building apps with AI-assisted coding can be quite tricky if you start with a blank empty space. Previously I used to prompt the LLMs like a rookie by saying "fix this, add this, build this", and so on. And this is usually frowned upon in the developer circles, and it seems to be quite an irresponsible way to do AI-assisted programming. But "vibe coding" has so much more to offer to this world,...
In some product-related decisions, we deal especially with the problem of incentives. In a more crude way, we can treat incentive problems as either zero-sum games, or positive-sum games. I thought that was a great framing, and went on with my worldview, and my life, and my regular product-work, until I found a better framing, a better explanation! I've dived into game theory more recently, and...
For decades, formal education has resembled a Procrustean bed—a system that stretches or cuts students to fit a rigid mold, regardless of their needs, talents, or pace. Every child is expected to learn the same material in the same way, at the same time, and at the same speed, in lockstep with their peers. Struggle too long with a concept, and you're left behind. Master it too quickly, and you're...
If superintelligence has already been commoditized and neatly packaged into the workforce, what would our renewed "mediums of message" look like? To understand the shape + form of medium 2.0, we might need a quick detour through the history of mediums and 'what has been.' We've experienced revolutions and centuries of evolution in how we communicate — In ancient times, communication was primarily...
AI-assisted coding has this strange phenomenon of making the 10x developer, a 100x one. For the rookie, it's either a hit-or-miss, and you usually end up with a lot more slop and hallucinations. I've been building various tiny apps, scripts, and projects by vibe-coding it, and I seem to have got marginally better at it. I've developed maxims that have proven effective in 'taming the dragon':...
Forgetting concepts is good for your memory. Forgetting them for a certain duration, and thinking about them again, actually makes the memory more concrete. This could be best illustrated by the repetition curve graph below: Our memory is prone to logarithmic decays as time passes by. But as we keep recalling the ideas/concepts at certain intervals, you can see here from the graph that the slope...
Writing for yourself on your personal website is the purest form of self-expression on the internet. It avoids any trappings from the algorithmic maze. And there are no digital echo chambers. It's just you and your ideas in your own cozy little garden. We're witnessing the renaissance of personal websites. As social platforms become increasingly unstable, more creators are rediscovering the power...
My blog has had a median of ~2 visitors per day for almost two years (nowadays, it's only a marginal improvement). And I don't care. Writing is thinking. And this blog has served as a public notepad well enough. As Alexey Guzey points out — perhaps the best indicator of your online writing having benefits is when you are not too embarassed to tell people. "Oh, BTW, I wrote about this/collected...
Three different kinds of humans exist in this planet. Shape rotators, wordcels and journey-shifters. You are usually a mix of one, two or all of these traits. If you’ve been following nerdish and science fiction oriented Twitter and blogs, you might already be familiar with 'shape rotator' and 'wordcels', often in snarky or oblique contexts. In Roon's famous essay — A Song of Shapes and Words, he...
The top 1% smart thinkers I've observed have all been very clear thinkers. They could elucidate complex thoughts as they understanding the basics, at a very fundamental level. Sure, you could memorize all kinds of complicated concepts and stitch them together, but you will only get so far. And I feel that cleaner thinking is an outcome of deeper reflection — both reflection in action, and...
We have more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds, and books on ornithologists written by birds. Taleb eloquently describes this as the key problem of knowledge, or in other words as epistemic arrogance. Strong corollary can be drawn with various disciplines, including entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs simply spend more time doing entrepreneurship rather...
Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The sfumato technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers thick, using fingers to blend the colors and create the depth of illusion. The creation...
Strongly recommend everyone to keep private notes about people. These could even be some random jotted keywords: "served in the navy", "capuccino lover", "biker", "loves going on long walks", and so on. When private notes accumulate over time in the form of a database, they start showing emergent properties. As Derek Sivers rightly points out in his essay: having your own database is one of the...
Imagine you're building a house. You could break down the act of building into various steps: first comes the foundation, then the framing, then the roofing, and the plumbing, and the wiring, and so on. Or you could try to do it all at once, ordering a jumble of materials and hoping they somehow come together into a structure. When I instructed Claude/Cursor to build an app, I did something...
I've tried various tools and systems for online writing, but nothing beats the power of Zettels. What are they, really? You may ask. They come from the Zettelkasten method, developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was incredibly prolific. He wrote around 70 books and 400 peer-reviewed articles in 30 years. That's a lot of writing. How did he do it? He credits his Zettelkasten....
Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as Smart Connections on Obsidian. It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that...
As a Rails enthusiast, I've always wanted a better deployment solution to house my hobby projects. It was not that there was no good solution available: We have AWS, Heroku, Hatchbox, Fly, Render.io and various other such PaaS alternatives. AWS has been too complex personally to build side projects. That, and the +500% markup. All these PaaS providers were ultimately wrappers sitting on top of...
The usual approach to building a design system often involves compiling a list of font families, typography guidelines, color palettes, patterns, and similar visual elements. Take Gumroad, for example, one of the best open-source design systems out there. It seemingly covers everything a company might need—color schemes, icons, font selections, even sticker packs, and more. When examining...
In the classic Turing Test, a computer is considered intelligent if it can convince a human that it’s another human in a conversation. At that time, human-generated content dominated the internet. But that was a decade ago. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically. AI-generated content now rivals, and in some cases outpaces, human-created material. According to the 'expanding dark forest'...
When you actively hold a question in your mind, you start seeing potential answers and questions related to it pop up in your radar. The question and the answer co-evolve in a gracious dance enriching our understanding of the world and space around us. Questions act as your personal radar. > The textbook definition of a question is a sentence used to seek information. But it feels borderline...
Intended Audience — For those who are in a transitory phase in their careers, looking for their next big leap of faith. This is a guide to harvest opportunies in a systematic fashion In the past seven months since I'd shifted to London, I've been on the lookout for harvesting opportunities around me. I deliberately avoid using the term 'job hunt' here, as I sought to broaden my scope beyond...
A cardinal sin when it comes to design research is when some one asks a leading question. If you're interviewing a consumer of Pepsodent toothpaste, you should almost never, ever, ever, ask "How much do you enjoy using Pepsodent toothpaste?". That's a leading question, and the answers you might get from this question are usually loaded with confirmation bias. It would be more along the lines of...
Some vibe-writing maxims: - While writing, have two windows open: one for the writing, and the other one for ChatGPT. Previously he used to consult ChatGPT a couple of times for internet research, but now the role has transitioned to be a more conversational thought partner, helping you riff-raff on the idea for the essay. (Let's say you're writing an essay about tarrifs, and you want to...
I’ve been refining my writing and publishing workflow to the point where it feels effortless. It combines Obsidian for writing, AstroJS for building the site, and Cloudflare Pages for deployment. Everything now lives locally, in plain text, structured neatly for both creative flow and technical control. And this is partly inspired by Kepano's adherence to the local, plain-text format: > File over...
Taleb insists that we've been scammed by the Gaussian distribution club. The gaussian distribution has become so ubiquitous in our daily jargons, oru day-to-day decisions even. >"We have been duped by the bell curve. Mandelbrot was the first to rigorously prove that markets are not Gaussian." – Taleb As most real-world phenomena: especially complex, human-involved systems are not well-behaved in...
If you were tasked with a need to find the tallest mountain, and went searching in a far away land surrounded by a series of mountains, how would you finalise the tallest mountain, especially when you could still go farther, and find even more taller mountains (only if you explore even more). There are various ways to term this, some call it the travelling salesman problem, or the "secretary...
It took me a long time to realize that arguments we argue about — aren’t always about facts. They are about values. Reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind made this clear, that: be it liberals or conservatives, or activists or traditionalists — they’re all wired with different moral priorities—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. They feel different things are sacred. What seems...
I was listening to a talk by Debbie Mcmahon from Financial Times recently at Productcon recently and I was surprised by the fact that even in journalism we're seeing tailwind trends more and more computational skills required — genAI is now used to spot stories, and to spin up newsworthy headlines and narratives around these stories. They are now, 'computational journalists'...who are equipped...
When you land on a site, you are treated with various hyperlinks. Based on the UX choices you make, you might end up preferring one over the other. You might get the job done, and head back to your earlier Chrome tab. Nothing out of the ordinary. It's an internet search as usual. But what about those pages which have no visible links on the site you just searched. It’s hidden in plain sight, but...
My last year's resolution was to learn how to build on Rails. I taught myself the basics by following some courses, but nothing really stuck with me. I wasn’t building apps; I was getting into a tutorial rut. I needed a better way to learn, akin to being pushed into the river with a swimming instructor. So, I discovered the Founder/Hacker course, which provided more tactical insights into the...
Analysing codebase and understanding the patterns followed at a top level has become surprisingly easier nowadays with the help of tools such as Gemini (for larger context windows), Gitingest (to convert codebases to simpler markdown), and Mermaid.js (for visualising mermaid diagrams). This is how I would approach understanding a fresh new codebase in order to take a cursory look: Use Gitingest...
The first draft usually generated by AI is so devoid of your style and personality, and to get to the stage where it even comes remotely close to that requires a lot of fine-tuning, and custom prompts. Last week, I was looking at various ways in which I could "style transfer" my writing style to AI generated drafts. Due to the time consumed in style-transfer, I ended up writing on my own. (Read...
I used to run my blog on Ghost CMS hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet for $20/mo. Now I do all that for $0/mo using AstroJS, Cloudflare pages hosting. I didn't make any major tradeoffs, I just ditched the old way of relying on third party services to serve my software needs. And I fancied the idea of building my own site from scratch by just vibe-coding all the way — By just talking out loud to...
We lack frequent usage of the future past tense in modern discourse. When I was recently drafting my new year resolutions, I noticed the use of 'I can', and 'I will', and found myself questioning the format, especially when I see that I'm good at making promises, but end up being miserable at keeping them. I also observed that when I write "I achieved..." instead of "I will achieve..", I can...
Let's say you have to make slides for tomorrow's big meeting. Your boss wants five strategy points on one slide. You know that's too much to be put on one slide, but it's being insisted. "This gives a complete picture of our strategy". "We can't split it up." You think there is another way. You spread these points across five clean slides, one point per slide, and you still receive a pushback....
Imagine having an idea in the shower and testing it before breakfast? It's highly plausible now as AI lets you prototype at the speed of thought. Currently, I use Claude Projects and Cursor to build what I call disposable apps: quick prototypes that prove a point (read more in this essay about vibe coding). The magic? No sunk costs. I can write 5,000 lines of code in ten minutes, test it, and...
Let's take a clear pond flourishing with various aquatic plants — water lilies, duckweeds, water milfoils, you name it. The variety of these plants provide a delicate balance, feeding the pond with nutrients, and this very natural filtration system. The algae still tries to outcompete the aquatic plants, but these plants still have an edge (at least for now). The microbial balance ensures the...
As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I have a very shabby process of getting things done. There could be a golden standard out there worth emulating; but nevertheless, this (rather easy) system works for me, and I continue to follow this— 1. Most of the work in completing the to-dos lies in preparing my own mindset. I have a standard 9-to-5 job, and this works the best for me to plan...
What differentiates a good essay and a great essay? — With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves and branches. You don't see the larger tree among the branches. While listening to one of the podcast episodes from David Perell's Writes...
In the world of nutrition research, contradictory findings are as common as fad diets. One day, a study proclaims the benefits of a low-carb diet for weight loss. The next, another study champions a plant-based diet for overall health. This constant flip-flopping of dietary advice leaves most of us feeling like we're stuck in a nutritional ping-pong match. The root of this problem lies in the...
Showing proof-of-work as a designer is quite simple. You made an app, you communicated the output product and exhibit how the product evolved over time ranging from the paper napkin sketch, low fidelity, high fidelity prototypes and finally a fully fledged product. The iterations need not just be tangible, but can be verbal too. Similarly, for an engineer the proof of work is also quite solid....