Developer forever

In the early 1900s, a young Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan sent a letter filled with strange formulas to G.H. Hardy, a renowned mathematician at Cambridge. Hardy, initially skeptical, soon realized that the sender was no ordinary man—Ramanujan had uncovered deep mathematical truths without any formal training. One of Ramanujan’s most astonishing ideas was about partitions—the number of ways a number can be broken into smaller parts. Ramanujan developed a formula to predict the number of partitions with remarkable accuracy, almost as if by magic. But he didn’t have a proof—just

It was April 2021. With just one week to go before my Y Combinator interview, I found myself sitting in my doctor’s office, facing an unexpected crisis. The doctor told me that I had a severe leak in my heart and needed open-heart surgery immediately. The estimated recovery period was two months—one month for preparation and another for recovery. That was almost the entire duration of the YC program. If I got accepted, I would spend that time in a hospital rather than participating in the program. This situation was particularly daunting since I was the sole developer in my startup. My co-foun

Six years ago, I was at crossroads. Our product recommendation engine for eCommerce had hit a dead end. GDPR concerns made large retailers hesitant to work with vendors like us—they feared potential compliance violations could cost them millions in fines. But we had something valuable: product data collected from Amazon, which we used to train our recommendation algorithms. I wanted to test a new approach—selling this product data to eCommerce companies that wanted to build their own recommendation engine but didn't want to share customer data.So, I quickly created a Google Form to collec

DeepSeek just dropped a bombshell: $200M in annual revenue with a 500%+ profit margin—all while charging 25x less than OpenAI. But DeepSeek didn’t just build another AI model. They wrote their own parallel file system (3FS) to optimize costs—something that would have been unthinkable for a company of their size. This was possible because AI helped write the file system. Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself. An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.Disappearing PillarsFor y

Developers are increasingly relying on AI to generate code from natural language prompts—a practice known as vibe coding. This hands-off approach is creating a generation of developers who don't fully understand their own code. A couple of years ago, I wrote:AI takeover won't be like Skynet, but it might still have the same effect. It'll start with small improvements to UX by suggesting what user wants. But as accuracy increases, users will get hooked & delegate all decision making to AI.Still, I am surprised by how fast this has happened, and the fact that coding is one of the first domai

The fight against distillation in AI is eerily similar to the battle against Napster in the music industry. Shutting it down didn’t stop piracy—it just forced the industry to evolve. Suing and banning DeepSeek won’t stop model distillation either. Instead, we could build Distillation-as-a-Service on top of DeepSeek R1 and help countries and businesses develop their own frontier models at a fraction of the cost.What Is Distillation and Why the Controversy?Distillation is like a student learning from a teacher: instead of memorizing every detail, the student grasps key concepts and simplifies kn