Developer forever

Last week, in one of the OpenAI DevDay interviews, Sam Altman said he expects zero-person startups in years to come. Meanwhile, OpenAI's support agent seems to be struggling to answer correctly. I ran into trouble while finetuning its model to invoke MCP calls consistently. So I asked that question on email and the support agent came up with all sorts of wrong answers. I was about to give up when an OpenAI engineer jumped in and fixed it. He spoke to his MCP team and told me that finetuning MCP calls are not supported yet and asked me to use tool calls instead. So why is it that the AI of the

At Guesswork, we are a team of four engineers with no background in sales or marketing. So, we had to figure out a way to get customers without relying on any of those skills. That led us, through trial and error, to a surprising approach: we call it "Build a Cannon to Kill a Mosquito." Using this methodology, we’ve acquired over 4,500 customers. In my talk at Lean culture, I explained how we did it, and why this counterintuitive strategy works especially well for technical founders. This is a summary of that talk.Three Startup ArchetypesMost startups fall into one of two categories:Technology

As someone who uses AI for everything, I decided to take it a step further and asked ChatGPT to do my performance appraisal. It was surprisingly good. For example, it knew my coding style (my preference for promise instead of async/await) and recommended me to document it for onboarding new employees. No human manager would’ve been this precise. In a few years, AI may understand all our preferences and evolution better than we do. ChatGPT’s implementation of memory allows it to learn from prior conversations, enabling this kind of personal modeling. And that led me to wonder: what if Chat

One of the constant debates I have with my dad is how unhealthy fruit juice is compared to whole fruit. Bottled juices from supermarkets often strip away fiber and vitamins, leaving mostly sugar. Even when these drinks are fortified with vitamins and labeled to resemble real fruit, they’re nowhere near as healthy. That’s why NutriScore - an algorithm designed to rate food healthiness doesn’t just analyze ingredients; it begins by determining the category of the food. Fruit juice and whole fruit are scored differently.This classification step is at the heart of Neartail’s search engine for heal

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