In fact, the leading questions towards the end of an agent’s response, prompt me to think what the agents want me to think. If I’m coming with the intention of doomprompting (essentially finding my way out by asking low-effort questions), I’m likely being swayed in a direction that a normalized system wants me to go – towards efficient mediocrity.

This autocomplete of thought often gets me to complete my shit, but I fear what will happen to my brain if I don’t spend enough time thinking hard about things. What if the shit I produce remains in an eternal state of shittyness? Mediocrity is not difficult, which is why it is what it is.

I think of this as a double-sided problem in 2026 and beyond. Using AI tools to get shit done as fast as possible and go as far as possible. On the other hand, there’s a separate (and arguably more important skill in this economy) of working hard through problems and thinking about them in full. Holding onto thoughts, letting them ferment and come up with a new direction – fairly free from the bias of normalcy. Unbounded, creative, weird, surprisingly useful.

Most of the times, these problems are not novel. Most problems that you struggle with in your day-to-day are often solved. You just need to look at the answer key that kind humans (and now agents) can bring to you right in front of your eyes.

Say you’re trying to figure out how to get into a B-school after having spent a few good years in the world of tech. A problem which at least has a rough template – a difficult but repeatable playbook. Beautiful products that could be made out of such problems in today’s day and age. Check out mine.

Or, say you’re creating a binary search algorithm on a new language that you’re learning. It’s by no means an unsolved, or even a hard problem in computer science terms. But writing the code by hand v/s using an AI copilot to generate the code for you puts your brain in two separate flows. Learning about one type of search algorithm sets you up for other kinds of searches and the foundation of understanding code complexity – by no means an irrelevant skill even now!

The former allows us to get the job done as quickly as we can. The other allows to wander and make unforeseen connections. One’s an efficient short-term strategy, the other is the sustainable long-term one.

I’m firming up on the realization that both of these are needed at different points in time. The deeper I get into the act of building, the more I realize that I need both modes of thought at different points in the day. I’m best served by jotting stuff down on paper early in the morning, having made weird connections and ideas in my slumber. I best function by using agents for the act of autocomplete of thought™️ during the slow afternoon hours, when the easy way out would’ve been a small siesta and the large guilt that follows.

Basically, whatever helps sail your boat. The eventual goal of both of these modes of thought is the same – getting yourself to a flow state and keep chucking at your hard problems like a woodpecker driving itself into wood. Or being the productive sculptor that keeps chiseling the marble in small increments, no matter how small. Over hours and days and months and years, you’ll get there. First slowly, then all at once.

The risk of sticking with a single mode is also twofold. Working analogue in an age where your competitors are catching up quickly with AI makes you lose economic relevance (your “edge”). Staying “plugged in” may either make you run in circles around your hardest problems, prevent breakthroughs and also wear you out (the “burnout”). Both of these extremes are risks in stagnancy disguised as productivity – leading to plateaus and making you lose motivation altogether.

With that said, I’m still trying to find out what keeps me moving. Don’t mind this one, or tell me more if you do – it’s just a working theory that I felt like sharing out in the open. I’ve spent far too much time thinking about it in analogue isolation. It had to come out on a digital medium. This Substack felt like a good place.

Where do you like to think? Where do you like to work?

Lid on or lid off? And why not both?

The comment section is all yours.

Cheers,
Samyak

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For the first part:

“Samyak, could you please do a favour and leave AI out of this conversation for God’s sake?”

No.

It’s important to talk about this because (a) it’s fun (b) it’s pretty relevant and (c) it helps me build a circle of interesting people who “get it” and possibly boost my subscriber count.

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We’ve seen social media getting used, misused and reused for that perennial “content creator” who makes a living out of sharing takes, often very polarized, for the sake of raking in views and followers. To be fair: not all creators are rage-baiters or trend-chasers. Some social media platforms endorse ragebait more strongly over others, then too for some specific content categories.

This category of creators is not the kind who shares optimistic white-pill tech stories like or , or honest personal takes honed after years of their expertise from folks like or .

This is a special category of devils who get a kick out of spreading FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) or build a following out of sharing recycled takes in their own name and post a million times about them in a format that allows them to hijack the algorithm in their favour. The hijack is done on very humanistic terms, though.

They will start their post with a siren emoji and claim that the world is going to end and there’s only one way to save it. They will provoke public by taking one comment from one individual out of context, and go after entire groups of people. The content that “performs” the best these days takes the least amount of brain cells to process and leaves you feeling bloated in the brain. The more the bloat, the more you’d bleat. 🐑

But something interesting is happening. The AI algorithms that helped them rise up the ranks are being countered by this cesspool of AI-generated artifacts that quickly kills trends and gives way to original takes and direct creator-follower relationships.

Didn’t follow me? I’ll start again.

There’s a reason why negative news spreads faster on the internet. The reason is pretty simple: natural selection. Our ancestors were wired to spot threats, negativity, fires and scarcity before they appreciated the jungle for its giant trees and clear night skies. This simply helped them survive and pass on their progeny, as is the biological goal of all living species on this planet.

The creators on these platforms, and the platforms themselves understand this far too well. You’ll often come across ragebait headlines (”X should be wiped out of existence”), distracting reactions and visuals as overlays on the main content, overly colourful subtitles, podcast mics in front of creators (to command credibility) and even highly-saturated colours (with weird red-looking skins). In other words, these creators have learned the tricks of the trade and are able to hold their audience and their attention hostage. Some things just plain work on everyone and you really can’t help it if you’re human.

Negativity drives more engagement for the platform on one end, and keeps the creators suitably rewarded and hungry for more. This is not exactly a win-win either. What creators make is what they take away from their users – attention. Captive eyeballs and soggy minds, who lose their sleep over the state of the world and their own miseries.

A lot of these posts are created by “experts” whose expertise stems from the “research” of a single 10-minute video essay. Or worse, a 10-second Instagram reel. Vanity theorists and armchair activists, minting posts and brewing circular arguments, acting up as though what they said is not being echoed by a few hundred others like them.

The AI algorithms pick this up, neutrally. They don’t care about the commentator’s credentials, but only their hot takes and the reactions driven by them. This gives these creators social and financial incentives and the cycle continues.

Content which is meant to “light a spark” generates emotions and rails off any possibility to introduce logic. The conversations erode and the audience loses the plot.

The recent NEET upheaval is a textbook example of this behaviour. The conversation, which should’ve unequivocally been about how to improve testing standards in national exams, got littered and dominated by how Gen-Zs are a threat to the nation or how the ruling party is a threat to democracy. Who cares about exams anyway?

If this is any respite, it’s not exclusive to India. We’re seeing this trend across the world. There was book written on this topic (which I’m yet to read) called ‘The Death of Expertise’ by a writer whose columns I’ve enjoyed in the past (Tom Nichols). The book essentially talks about how information is conflated with insight and how armchair activists pose themselves as experts on topics through a summary which is now even easier to obtain through ChatGPT.1

The problem is that the playbook is now obvious to a lot of struggling creators and they have to lean on being unauthentic and sometimes resort to all sorts of baits to be successful in this game which gets difficult every single day.

Now comes the fun part.

There’s the famous saying in Hindi, “Zeher hi zeher ko kaatata hai” (Poison poisons the poison). My hopeful argument in this post is that we’re at an interesting inflexion point, from where we’ll see a sharp reversal in these consumption and creation trends. There are a bunch of factors at play, and AI is at the heart of it all.

The reversal of incentives

When people just started hanging out online, serving ads along the margins of your 4:3 CRT box was the only good way to monetize your website. Shove a few ads, and you’d at least be able to pay back the server costs if people enjoy reading your blogs.

But soon enough, people started getting tired, just too damn tired of ads. They started seeing it everywhere, and platforms made sure they did. There came a time, not too long ago, when users were given an option to opt out of that experience for a small fee. As they found comfort in hanging out online, largely thanks to easy internet access through mobile phones and easier ways to pay, they loosened up to the idea of getting out of this cesspool of ads through a small subscription.

Platforms started adapting to this reality. Direct cut off subscriptions like how Substack does it, now seem like legit ways to monetize at scale. The 1,000 true fans vision put by Kevin Kelly in the 2000s is actually becoming increasingly real.

Premium subscriptions to AI tools like ChatGPT – which rely on token spends – have loosened hands even more. The average developer is spending in the range of a few 100s of dollars every month to get large parts of their job done.2

Any business behaviour is shaped by who is paying for its services. Meta has pre-dominantly been an advertising company selling its ad space to brands that can sell themselves. Therefore it works for its customers (brands), and do the bare minimum to keep their users on the platform. But in a parallel universe, if users somehow end up paying nearly as much as brands pay Meta, then Meta starts working more for the users.

Moreover brands, who have a finite ad budget to spend in a year, may find it much higher ROI activity to monetize over newer channels like ChatGPT, which could expose them to their users directly. If they have a $100 to spend on customer acquisition, they’d spend a majority of these on a place which gets them more users.

This is the same phenomenon through which brands moved out of print media and into social media. Now we may see this happening again, brands moving out of social media into advertising over the question/answer space where higher-intent users hang out.

This seems to me partly the reason why Meta is also spending a bomb on AI infrastructure, having acquired scale.ai and it’s super-talented team, building their own class of open-weight LLMs (Llama, Muse) and coding harnesses. They’re probably sensing a shift in demand, and a threat to their core business model. And they know that they need to hurry up.

All of this means lower incentives to push ragebait (which people are getting tired of) and incentive to push stuff to the feeds that people would pay for.3 OnlyFans Substack has probably been the most successful recent example. Once a loyal fan subscribes to their favourite writer’s OnlyFans Substack, everyone is happy. OnlyFans Substack earns off a %age of their creator’s revenue, the creator gets paid and validated directly by their viewers readers and the readers get to back and enjoy what they came for.
(no pun intended)

All of this may mean lesser ragebait, less reactionary content as there are simply small incentives for the algorithms to put such stuff across to you.

To sum everything up…

The floor is lower, but the ceiling is higher

In a world where everyone writes polished texts and builds beautiful word salads, who would you trust?

Have you seen creators mumbling the same AI tells, the same hot takes (doesn’t that make it lukewarm then?) on your reels recently.

“It’s not X, it’s Y”
“Here’s the best part”
“No X. No Y. Only Z.”

That is because IT IS convenient to generate a script instead of writing your own. This is not limited to video scripts alone. The videos themselves are either using the same format of a hundred cuts in the same 10-second video, or have AI-generated clips meant as B-rolls.

That weird fisheye caption font (I hate it), that same oft-repeated dialogues. The same POVs, the same memes. The same kind of trends which rot every week, giving rise to a new one.

This is because the most popular AI tools triangulate towards the same creation recommendations for all creators who use those tools. As a creator who wants to mint as much content as possible to please the algorithm, nothing is stopping you from using these AI tools to mass-produce content.

The result? The same shiny, polished stuff. Content creation at industrial scale. But no warmth, no personality. Only what “performs the best”.4

The more your audience sees such repetitive shit, the more pissed they feel. As someone who talks to agent as his full-time job, I’ve unconsciously developed the ability to guess which model was used to write which sentence in any given LinkedIn post.5

Now, when everyone can do it, the value shifts upward. Nobody cares for your word salads because they can make one themselves at home.

I saw a very interesting graph recently.

This gave me a lot of hope!

Everyone who dreams to be an influencer, which in today’s age has increasingly become an act of instigating offence are being challenged by people who wield better tools. Fake influencers drawing fake likes and fake reshares by fake followers. They started rigging the game so much that the system imploded.

The creators who farmed charming aesthetics are being challenged by machines who create even more charming stuff. The machines can manufacture this at a scale that humans can’t keep up. Who can (humanly) create 10 high-quality reels a day from different locations for 365 days a year without burning out?

The point is: everything looks the same. What remains? Original takes by people who’re awash with experience. The surface-level studs who used to rule the world by hacking and reverse-engineering AI algorithms with polish are being challenged by another class of AI systems. Katai zeher!

Combine the point above (direct over ad-powered) and the fact that everyone can now create and this is what you’ll get:

What gets you higher quality?

Having been there, done that. Sharing ground-level insight that ChatGPT summaries can’t teach you. Building the kind of competence that would take you years of focussed practice. even if theY come in PooRly ConstrUCcted sentencesess, they should stand the test of authenticity if they’re simply legible enough.

And most of all, when everybody does create, you’d find less “celebrities” and more people living a good life with their 1,000 true fans. These people will have lesser reasons to succumb to the algorithm once they’ve built a baseline level of trust. Trust and depth will help you go more direct with your followers and build deeper relationships with them. This post by is an interesting foray into the dominance of craft over reach.

LAYER BY LAYER

Reach Is Dead. Craft Is the New Currency.

Hallo readers…

Read more

18 days ago · 46 likes · 4 comments · Fatema Raja

Well yes, it’s good news – but nothing more than moderately-probable scenario. The trendlines do seem hopeful though.

And that, kids, is how I met your mother how’s social media changing, for the better imo. Also why you need to walk the walk before you can talk the talk. No shortcuts anymore, only nice, long, fun trips in this journey called life.

This came out to be a bit longer than what I expected. But if you read this all the way to the end, then you’re a shining ray of light and the world needs more people like you. Or at least I do!

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Let me know if you agree or disagree to my little “hot take”. I’d call it a “chill take” because it nothing groundbreaking, just reassuring. Whatever you feel about it, I’m happy to know more about it!

Thanks for reading it all the way to the end though. Much appreciated!

Cheers,
Samyak

• the first post (this one) talks about how one earns the right to comment on stuff they say on the internet

• the second post (coming on the upcoming weekend) talks about the current state of affairs, and how is AI helping us clear the fluff

If any of the two takes sound interesting to you, you should definitely consider subscribing to this newsletter for more. We’re just getting started.

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These days, I start my day early, taking my own sweet time to get ready for work. I only open my laptop when I arrive at my office at around 10-11, and keep slogging till the end of the day till my brain can’t take it anymore. This is when I typically head out to the gym, and come back only to find myself hooked to the “boring black screen”1 once again. I’ve never felt closer to being a computer geek, and frankly, I’m having a blast doing it!

But there comes a point where I just am too tired to move a finger, or even use Wispr Flow to dictate ramblings and prompts to my agents, which is when I would just spend time grazing through my Substack and X feeds as though I’m collecting pebbles on the shore of a river2.

In this madness, I have (re)entered into the rabbithole of Steve Jobs archives. Long lectures and keynotes from the 80s and 90s, blogs, historical emails and ofc the occasional short videos that every platform tends to hurl at me.

One of these insights really stuck with me and I’ve been thinking hard about this for some time.

This came in as a reassuring take as I’ve increasingly seen people go the opposite way, and have always doubted myself.

We’re often told that the act of building and the act of thinking about what to build are two separate crafts, which is why you have the PM and the engineer, the autistic tech co-founder and the ADHD business co-founder, the Batman and the Robin, the accelerator and the brake – you get the point, right?

But Jobs proclaimed the opposite. In his view, the builders get to earn the right to be intellectual only after they’ve been in the trenches and have done some building themselves. From a common sense perspective, that also seems true.

But upon thinking a little further, I came to a conclusion that both of these perspectives are true. The important nuance is when these happen. The policymaker is a policymaker today, but to be the best in policymaking she should also have had some experience of doing the dirty work that her policy affects. The head chef in a kitchen started out by sweeping floors first.

It’s just that in the age of AI-assisted knowledge work, these timelines are starting to merge. The act of learning and the act of graduating are collapsing into each other.

What Jobs meant to say, at least in my view, was that you can be a commentator on technology, culture, business, spirituality and what not if you have lived the reality of what you’re saying yourself. Building something requires a real intellectual lift that ironically, purely intellectual work cannot provide.

That also doesn’t necessarily mean that you may be doing these things together at the same time. We as human beings are limited by the number of things we can pay attention to at any given point in time. Which is why we may actually be served better if we decouple the thought of why we are building from how we are building, hand it over to different people, or if time allows, make the same person go through the entire ordeal themselves. Our limited attention is why we hire for more people, and will keep doing so as businesses grow and expand.

Which is why great operators become great investors3, and why the best tech commentators on Substack4 and the people who write the best essays on public policy5 have been through that rite of passage themselves. It’s kind of obvious but you can’t develop insight through summaries, or any form of such secondary research. Lived experienced is us taking in the world, not only through our eyes or ears, but through all the senses all at once, for a reasonably long period of time. All that calcifies to become insight worth sharing.

This also means that if you want to be heard, you need to become worthwhile of saying it.

We have become so attached to the modality of “knowing something” just by watching videos (or worse, reels) that we fail to remember that photos and videos were always meant to be “images” of the broader human experience. Which is also why text, as ironical it is, often is a better medium to propagate insight as it doesn’t have to be contained between two black bars of the right aspect ratio or the right kind of colour grading. Paper as a medium is often touted to be indestructible and old books tell tales about forgotten civilizations even today.

That is not to say that videos are useless. They are a high bandwidth medium for consuming any kind of information and justify their commercial success very well. As much as I laud text for being THE medium I also know that my mom doesn’t read my essays but she raves about any videos my brother or I post on our social media, even if she doesn’t get it at all. It’s just that you may conflate the medium with the message because of the commercial success of something which is the equivalent of eating mud wrapped in chaandi ka warq. What’s most popular is not always correct.

Which is also why, for the longest time I’ve held back from posting sharp takes about a lot of things that I felt strongly for. At least that’s how I rationalized it in my head. Not sure if holding back has served me well though in an age where people are spinning up personal brands on LinkedIn and earns lakhs in their early twenties through repeated playbooks. Whatever sails your boat, I guess. And it’s almost never a bad thing to earn well if you can.

However, my last four years in my PM stint (and an almost vertical learning curve) + my recent founder arc have borne me at least some “experience capital”. Going forward, I expect to be able to cast much sharper takes and make evocative statements while still being authentic and not sounding like a ragebaiter picking a fight to serve a merciless algorithmic god while risking my credentials for a few likes and a monthly payout over X.

One such example is how Facebook is probably the worst tech company to be born in the best way possible. My urge to write anti-FB posts has been as old as my desire to build this newsletter. But only now am I convinced that I certainly won’t be selling my soul working for the company as a PM. That offers me the leeway to write what’s on my mind about Facebook and the precedent they’ve set in the corporate tech scene.

In a fast-changing world, it becomes more than important than ever to bring in unique takes. Most of what you may be sharing might come off as a response to a ChatGPT prompt. Think about what is it that you know that the LLMs don’t – the answer often lies outside the screen.

In the next part, we’ll go further into why AI is changing this landscape quickly, and how can it actually be good news for genuine creators and the sincere consumers. Stay tuned!

Cheers,
Samyak

I’m an internet native kid, like the rest of my generation. I also didn’t take too long (18-20 years is still small in the grand scheme of things) to realize that there’s a whole wide world outside of it. That making friends is perhaps more important to me than learning the next programming framework. And maybe as much important as getting good grades in school, if not more. Thanks to my mom, I was addicted to excellence from an early age.

When I entered college, my perspective shifted but somewhere deep down the hunger to chase excellence remained. I drove myself insane by the constant pull of being a different Samyak to different people, and had a proper breakdown in the process. It took me some time to realize that my body doesn’t adapt too well to stress (might talk more about this later) and also that I stressed over the wrong things. I liked pushing myself, but often not to the extremes.

It takes some figuring out to realize what is worth caring for, as the things that you care for also bring you the most amount of headaches. This is a reasonable tradeoff as with most things in life. But one thing I realized is that I had to care about something to live well; and the more intentional it is, the better I’ll feel about myself.

One way that I’m gauging it for myself, and I’m compelled to talk about it today as I prep for an investor meeting, is that I want to increase the radius of what/who I care for step-by-step. I’m doing this in a way which whets my appetite for risk and reward and helps me understand myself better. That, as opposed to suddenly jumping the gun one fine day, chasing planets and distant galaxies but knowing nothing about them beyond the ChatGPT summaries.

In other words, I’m penny-testing my mettle for building products.

What is penny testing, you ask?

During my product stint at Atlassian there was an interesting exercise that I got to do at least once a month, and if I’m lucky, about four. Since I worked in Commerce, penny testing was a test on the production environment (basically the non-test, real billing platform where real transactions happen) through a teeny-tiny amount (hence the “pennies”) on our own credit cards before we did a full-blown rollout to customers affecting millions, if not billions, of transaction volume. 7/10 times we were successful in our rollout, but there was always those 3 times that could’ve been much more expensive (we’re talking millions of dollars a quarter) if not caught at the right time.

When you start small, you have a chance to fall back and go back to the drawing board quickly. If you try being overly glorious too much too soon, you may crash and burn. And if you’ve ever experienced burnout, I don’t have to tell you how bad they are.

When I look back at it, the pattern speaks for itself. I’ve been fascinated by the world of products - both digital and physical. I explored the physical realm through robotics, dialled back a bit and started finding something craft-worthy in the digital. My product management gig taught me things that I needed to know before I go off building something with my own bare hands (with a little help from kind people on the web and the “transformers” ofc).

I dream of doing big things. It may not seem so immediately, but I really do. But buliding something is as much a discovery of yourself as the ether around you (or what we call “product-market fit”). Through the process of building something, we understand what motivates us and what did we take for granted. What saps our energy and that one obvious thing that nobody understands. Translated for the world of tech startups, it’s something similar to “founder-market fit” but with a bit more existential oomph.

The potential upsides of building in today’s day and age are HUGE. They really are. But at the same time what’s big and what’s “big enough” for different people may mean different. Does chasing unicorn valuation get you to feel good about yourself? Maybe. But what if it doesn’t? Maybe trillion dollars would do it. Or perhaps a checkpost that you passed was that perfect camping ground that you didn’t notice because nobody told you to slow down and look ahead.

Maybe you don’t care about all of that. Valuations and profits, impact and glory, beautiful spouses and flashy cars. All you care about is propping up to your desk, toiling hard every single day and coming back home with a beer Masala Dew in your hand and watching TV1 with your family.

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As for me, I don’t really know what’s pulling me to build everyday. All I know is that I’m really enjoying the process. Maybe it doesn’t entertain me in the next 2 years, or maybe my next 120 are already sorted.

I don’t know; it will take some building to figure it out. And I’d like to penny-test my own scale, my routine, my risk appetite to get to good answers, or maybe better questions.

For all I know; you discover what pulls you towards itself by firstly crawling towards it and then running after it as though your life depends on it.

A hard pill to swallow perhaps - but you don’t build for the universe, you build for you. Or maybe they’re one and the same thing, who knows...

1. puts agents and people on an equal pedestal

2. interprets both language and code as a medium of instruction

I let my thoughts brew and would look forward to what you think of this tool so far. Would you ever plan to use it in your company? How do you see communication in your company changing with the coming of agents? Do you think Slack and Github have an expiry date? Do let me know!

The only way I want you to remember me is that I love technology. I love how it brings a change to people’s lives and makes the impossible not only feasible, but routine.

One of these impossibilities was my extremely hyped-up idea that I sketched out on scraps of paper in my fourth year of college. In some distant future, I wanted to work on some kind of technology that helps people get out their heads and be a fun-but-important presence in the lives of their loved ones. The COVID-19 pandemic left me with hard-earned insight into existential questions, some of which I may share with you down the line. Well, maybe…

During the lockdown period, I was trying out oddball indie products made by unknown developers and made 100s of anon accounts if I found a cool Product Hunt listing. While also trying to digest all I could between human psychology, blockchain tech, computer vision (now subsumed by AI^TM), media theory and whatnot.

To add to it, I wished to write about the nuances of technology that people often saw but overlooked; in the hopes of inviting them into discussions of privacy, impacts on mental health and safety. Because even then (circa 2021), my parents, my cousins, and even some friends knew little about what’s happening with social media algorithms and politics, for example, and how it impacts their perception of their loved ones.

Learning and writing about these things attempted to indirectly address my own struggles as an engineering student trying to find his ground in a sea of opportunities.

As with almost everything in life, I was late to the party. There’s already content, books and workshops on these topics and I didn’t feel like drumming up the obvious. I wanted to add something unique to the world.

This uniqueness has been both a friend and a foe. Wanting to do something unique with my life led me to discover the sea of wonderful products, obscure YouTube playlists and product management during my time in college. It also led me to discard 100s of semi-cooked ideas because these were things someone already did before.

When AI came into the scene, a lot of us came to a realization that making things has been commoditized. If you can make something, several others as well can. The effort shifts upward - orchestration, decision-making and connecting unforeseen dots and, most importantly, building trust and getting people to use your products. Also, even if you’re an inventor, you cannot guarantee adoption or outcomes with your inventions. You need a package for your knowledge to scale and meaningfully change the world.

The problem of our times is not that no technology exists for our unique problems; it’s that most people are just not aware that it could do so much for them. Uplift them out their misery, their poverty and the hopelessness that they need to leave the country to be able to do something meaningful out of their life.

I’ve decided to do something about it. I want you to keep me accountable for the same.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

After having spent a busy few years working at my dream job as a Product Manager at Atlassian, I wanted to cool myself down off the busywork that occupied 15 hours of my day, and warm myself up back again to the new dawn of technology as we’ll see it 10 years from now.

Something really clicked. I found myself on a tab with ChatGPT on during breaks and work hours in 2024, seeing how far it goes with my bad jokes and when it breaks sweat. For the first time in several years, I saw a spark that I couldn’t find after years of playing with products. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but AI was something new, and had a very different texture to it. I could see this tech getting far more useful than something that helps you write emails without grammatical errors.

Since the GPT-3 days, I tried to stay on top of the new models drops and advancements but just couldn’t. After realizing that I wasn’t too late for making a career jump, and not so early that I’d be dismissed as a fluke, on the fine morning of 7 January, 7:07 AM this year (yes, that was intentional) I hit that email that was sitting in my inbox for more than a month. I finally parted ways with my dream job.

I took some nice 4-ish months to teach myself how to code (yet again) in an age where you really don’t code much, and shipping cool shiny personal projects. I started seeing more of my family and friends and started attending gatherings I missed out for a few years. Most importantly, I started working on my fitness after getting completely out of shape and out of breath on an old trek - now slowly getting back to shape.

This was me, crawling.

Crawl. Walk. Run.

And now, I’m ready to walk. And ready to fail.

Look, I know this sounds stupid but it’s true. Each failure strikes off a possibility in your bucket of to-dos, and you can only know it if you’ve tried. I wish I had a magic ball that helped me know what I’m best at doing, without feeling FOMO over what I didn’t do.

With that, soft-launching two projects that have been eating up my time lately:

• Saras

• Masala Dew (yes, you’re here!)

Let’s talk about Masala Dew for a sec. It starts off as a newsletter but has a life force of its own (yes, we dropped the blog. from the domain). It’s an initiative that tells stories about technology. Its perspective is centered to India, thanks to its founding team and its unique cultural positioning, but certainly not limited to it. It attempts to be funny, forward-looking and provocative, but most importantly, authentic. It is youthful but doesn’t discriminate on age. And it’s made for a post-AGI world, with an ever-improving understanding of where machines fail and what makes human work valuable.

Through this Substack, you may see me build a company (actually, two) in real time, hear about commentaries about the things that we come and gloss over on socials and also some tidbits that can make your lives better. I plan to invite my cool friends building cool things so that they can share how can you navigate this changing landscape, work yourselves out of your current job and elevate yourself into a new, powerful one.

This initiative intends to be many things, but not a personal brand per se. I see a community built out of a shared interest about tech and its side effects, and for people who just want to be more mindful about the things they use in their everyday lives. And also people who may wanna improve their career, relationships and useful mental models from work and play.

I used a BITS-pilled moniker for this newsletter as I originally wanted to involve high-agency people in this project from my alma mater as they were all around me. But the last few months have made me realize that there are many of us high-agency people looking to make a small dent in their universe - and especially in places where you least expect them.

The name remains unchanged though. After all, what’s in a name, anyway?

Crawl. Walk. Run.

We’re not running, no not yet. We don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.

Masala Dew has a direction but not a fixed roadmap. In a world where so much changes so soon, roadmaps are becoming no more than vain showpieces. Piece-by-piece, this publication will start taking shape and will describe itself, shaped by everyone who’s contributing to it. By everyone who chooses to stay.

If any of that resonates with you, and you wish to contribute meaningfully to the project / just have some ideas, do reach out at contact@karwaanlabs.com without any hesitation. No matter how shoddy your ask is, I guarantee to respond to your email, without AI (for the first few weeks at least!).

The scraps of paper from college had no name. Now they have a stupid one: Masala Dew. They’re still getting completed - not by me alone, but anyone who wants to build thoughtful products and a meaningful relationship with technology. If that sounds like you, you’re already a part of it.

See you on Monday!

Cheers,
Samyak

PS: I might do some personal writing that I share on occassion over my actual blog at samyaksahu.com/blog but not here. I don’t have a mailing list out there but I’ll let you know when I drop something there through a note on Substack/X.

Neymar, widely considered one of the best players of our generation, was criticized and spat upon when he made it to the Brazilian National Team for this World Cup. The keyboard warriors who cursed manager Carlo Ancelotti for caving to media pressure missed a very obvious point: his value to the team isn’t too much about fitness and how lethal he is compared to his 2015 self. Although I’d argue he’s still one of the best big game players this sport has witnessed, his greatest asset is the innate sense of happiness and fun that he brings to the squad.

He hasn’t brought the World Cup home (yet!) but no one else has in this current generation. That also doesn’t mean he hasn’t led his teams to titles.

Along the same lines, I’m inspired by the Browser Company’s idea of optimizing for feelings: building products that invoke some sense of emotion, again something you cannot put a number to, only feel.

Keeping Tabs by The Browser Company

Optimizing For Feelings

I. Why are we here…

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4 years ago · 269 likes · 15 comments · The Browser Company

No matter how many goals Neymar has scored or how much revenue Arc has generated, they point us towards a larger question: how do you model happiness-as-a-service?

Happiness is often talked about as a metric in employee reviews and HR discussions, but here’s the fun thing: you cannot put a number to it.

Which is also why you cannot have an entirely autonomous AI system that improves people’s happiness. What cannot be quantified cannot be improved. You can only give people who spread happiness the benefit of such tools so that they can reach out to more people. That sense of real improvement only happens when you go out into the wild, talk to real users, see what’s wrong, and provide objective solutions to their very subjective problems. The machines take care of the heavy lifting.

Happiness and pleasure are two different things. Pleasure is a fleeting emotion, mostly sensory. You feel it and then you don’t. Happiness, on the other hand, is something that goes the distance. It’s a sense of security, well-being, cheerfulness, and a sense of purpose and meaning that may or may not come with comfort or efficiency, which is often conflated with happiness. For example, exercising regularly makes you uncomfortable and perhaps irritated in the short term, but over the course of days, weeks, months, and years, you feel better about yourself. On the flip side, shots upon shots of your favourite drink after a hectic Saturday night feels amazing in the moment. But if you’ve ever been hungover, you know what I’m talking about!

The tech of today excels at giving people bursts of pleasure: a means of escape, a way to feel better about their miserable selves by hacking neural pathways. Boredom is a solved problem. If you don’t believe me, notice how you open Instagram Reels (or a vape that charges through type-C cable) whenever you’re faced with an uncomfortable thought. And how then you watch the reel at 2x the speed because you don’t want you brain to even have the slimmest thread of thought that may pop up between the spaces of two spoken words.

But sometimes that’s exactly the opposite of what you need. Sometimes you need brutal honesty from someone you trust, a pep talk when you’re going at it and feeling low, or validation from an expert that keeps you going. None of that can be supplied by technology. We can only do what we know best: team up the perpetrators of happiness with the technology that helps them scale their impact in this world — reach out to more people, do better things and don’t burn themselves out in the process.

That’s the future we’re slowly building towards. We want people like financial advisors, fitness coaches, and career counsellors, who make a living by giving long-term happiness to people directly or indirectly, to reach out to as many people as they can, while making sure that their job of spreading happiness as a service earns them enough to not only survive, but thrive. That’s how the vision of a “delegation economy” becomes a reality.

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We’re building something in this space. Wanna help build this? Shoot me a DM.

This one’s unrelated, but I wanna tell you a story.

A little less than four years ago, I lost my wallet. I had gone to an office party the day before I had to catch my flight to Qatar. A few things happened that night and I showed up at my home... well I would spare you the details. I want you to see me in a good light, for now and the rest of the posts that are to follow.

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I was angry. Angry at what I’ve done and what had happened to me. I should’ve known that I cannot quench my thirst by drinking a cocktail instead of water (oops). I should’ve also known that I, to the best of my ability, couldn’t get Neymar and rest of the Brazil squad through the final stages of the World Cup. No matter how deserving of a title they felt this time around. Or that Marquinhos couldn’t have pulled his knee towards himself to prevent the ball from getting deflected towards the goal. No amount of resentment could’ve changed all that.

But once I was able to get my wallet and my IDs back, I quickly packed my bags and took my first international flight, to witness what would be one of the greatest stories the history of sports has ever had to tell.

I landed at the Hamad International Airport on the noon of 18th December, carrying the sleep debt (and the hangover) of a regrettable night into a place which was totally alien to me.

For me, as much as I hate to say this now, Messi wasn’t as much on my mind. In fact I didn’t see Argentina being anywhere in the World Cup since their first loss to a team like Saudi Arabia. I watched the Netherlands quarter-final but in passing glances between my laptop screen and TV at my home, enjoying all the “perks” that remote work offers. It was true that I was surprised that they landed at the World Cup final but more than that I was bummed that Brazil didn’t make it.

I came into my hotel with my bag, took a shower and went in a swanky Uber towards Lusail in a calm acceptance. Purposefully distracting myself from the thoughts of the what this match could’ve been had the Canarinhos got into the final, I stopped 800 metres away from the stadium entrance until I was finally taken out of my slumber.

Stripes of sky blue and white consumed the entire entry path – on jerseys and balloons and stuffed toys. Shaikhs in robes of white and red were barely visible in their own land, the world had infested the streets of Doha. But the Qataris were merely invisible, not absent – their hospitality was unbelievably smooth. It never occured to us that more than 80,000 people were making their way into a shimmering golden frame that once could look at and wonder, “how on earth was this possible?”

This was no ordinary building. It was a living beast with a halo around it. The stadium drummed and roared from the inside. The tremors on the ground travelled their way up my heart. I placed a hand on my chest and felt something unusual. My breath seemed to agree.

I climbed into the seating area away from the madding crowd of the queues. The tunnel opened into the infinity of chants and drums. All of these were already audible and tangible, but suddenly that was literally everything we could hear or feel.

I had never felt an energy like this before. The closest I’ve felt like was when I looked up at an open night sky on the outskirts of Dharamshala under a blanket of stars and felt that I was so insignificant and yet so inseparable from everyone and everything around me.

The music from the Argentine chants still rings loud and clear in my head. The real deal was much louder though — the shouts of Vamos Argentina were energizing-yet-deafening. A small cluster of people on our opposite side were in red/blue colours of the French, perhaps no more than 1/8th of the stadium at the first glance. Even though it was 11 and 11 on each side on the field, off it the French look cornered. The representation was so brutal that the French side looked no more than a lock of hair stuck in the shower drain: they’re barely noticable but you still couldn’t ignore them.

Before getting seated we realized that some kind-hearts had placed a flag on the seats that could be draped around the body to show support to a certain team. Missing in my suitcase was a blue-and-white jersey (I was a fan of the yellow ones) so I didn’t hesitate in choosing a side. If we lost supporting Argentina, we at least lose together. If we win supporting France, we might lose some bones too…

I took comfort in the fact that one of the finalists is one of the greatest players to have ever graced the pitch. That the player had already lost the plot in his “peak” (as if there ever was one, it was a “plateau”) some 8 years ago. And yet, after a controversial retirement from international football, he came back when his nation needed him again. That it may or may not be his last dance (bless him and his longevity) but surely one of his most promising ones. That there was a sense of leadership and finality in his eyes when he commanded respect in one of the most fought-over fixtures that come to mind in recent memory. He didn’t have much to prove the world now, except for that one coveted trophy.

With the closing ceremony through, and Deepika Padukone and Iker Casillas (who could’ve guessed this combination) brought with themselves the FIFA World Cup trophy, did we understand that we’re not kidding anymore. This is no longer a dream — it was unfolding in front of our very eyes!

“Pinch me!” I told my friend. “We’re starting off with the World Cup final!”

The Argentinians warmed up and so did the person everyone came to see. It didn’t matter if you were French or an Argentine, an Indian or a German, a Madridista or one of his billion devotees, you were silently rooting for him.

To my surprise, he look pretty normal, not warming up even all that much beyond a few nice drills which everyone was supposed to do. He shot the ball well away from the goal a couple of times. Maybe he was just experimenting with the excesses of his bluntness — because we didn’t see him this way throughout the rest of the match.

After a lot of build up, the details for which I would spare you, the match started. And it started with me just forgetting about everything that happened in the tournament and remembering every reason why this match was important.

Kylian Mbappe was on a generational run. He had already scored in a World Cup final as a teenager and was now appearing for his second as a 23-year old. When he ran, his legs didn’t seem to hit the ground; the closest real-life resemblance to the Looney Tunes’ Road Runner.

He had the support of his accomplished countrymen: players of the calibre of Giroud, Dembele, Griezmann as the forwards. However, the Argentine support was probably too much for the Les Miserables and two of the senior players were swapped out in the first half itself. Argentina was on a generational run and had netted two goals in the span of the first 36 minutes.

Messi didn’t seem to work much beyond what he had to. He always does that. When you see him moving on the pitch you know some highlight reel is on its way of being made. That the magician is ready to pull out a rabbit out of his hat and you better stay still and just watch. Whenever the ball came to him, even for a lazy back pass, the crowd roared like he’s gonna sweep away the entire French defense like he once did against Getafe, or that time against Malaga, or that time against Real Madrid or that time against Athletic Bilbao... you get the point.

But he didn’t. The role he played throughout the World Cup campaign was much more silent and important. He stood up whenever he was asked to — for his team during the match against Netherlands. For the playmaking positions that almost always put his team at a higher ground on the level pitch. For the very fact that he was present on the pitch and the entire stadium and perhaps half the world’s population wanted to win it for him. That was the edge he brought to the team.

Both of the goals were on the side further from us, but the energy of humans around the stadium was the superconducting material that allowed to take in Di Maria’s clinical strike into the net in full glory, as though we were the ones who assisted him and not De Paul. As he was tearing up while celebrating, the fans around me were sharing the same emotion as him. At some point, it stopped feeling like an 11 v 11 game. Which is when I realized how important home advantage was in a game like this. The only problem was that Argentina had made the world their home, and the French couldn’t run away from it.

Being defending champions is a crown too heavy at times. The players had broad chests and long, strong legs to defend it. Coman, Thuram, Dembele, Lloris, Rabiot — they were already established giants in their own leagues and had proven the world how dangerous can they be when they come together under their manager Didier Deschamps.

The first half was all joy and laughter and a relief that Messi will now finally be crowned the champion. But the match was far from over. We went into the game thinking that we overpaid for the ticket. But boy, were we wrong...

Deschamps substituted in Kolo Muani and Coman for Giroud and Griezmann before the first half, giving signals that they were either ready to accept defeat or be ready to take up risky manoeuvres. But I’ve never been more wrong - the French side slowly seemed to gain momentum. The game went all the way back and forth, unusually aggressive and high stakes. It wasn’t full of fouls as the quarter-finals that Argentina had, but the speed at which the ball went box-to-box had the Argentinians stood up and glued to their seats.

Some 75 minutes in, and it felt like Argentina had the game in their control. Sighs of reliefs and lively chants started humming in the background again. But that’s when Mbappe decided to take the matter in his own hands.

He got fouled in the box, went in with a confident penalty and scored. Just as we thought that Argentina will be able to defend the one-goal lead, Coman managed to steal the ball from none other than Messi (very atypical), tossed it towards the left flank, where Mbappe managed to cut into the box, perform a pirouette out of nowhere into the ground and sending it right past Emilio Martinez. 2-2. The whole stadium went dead silent. Seemed like no one on the French side except Mbappe saw it coming.

It didn’t take long for the jacked referee (yeah for some reason everyone in the stadium was jacked except us both) to blow the final whistle, pushing the game towards extra time. The whole stadium, perplexed, wondered what went wrong. In my eyes, the Argentinian defence was doing alright, I was a little too overstimulated at the stadium to carefully assess tactics. Mbappe had been a big game player since teenage, so didn’t come off as too big of a surprise, just the very fact that the man alone had the guts to shake off a strong Argentinian side away from World Cup glory.

The extra time started, and we had no idea how tired were the players. But their adrenaline took the better of them and the game went on with pretty much the same consistency as before. The crowd went wilder than ever, the shirts came off, the kids were tearful and a random Argentinian woman held my tight by the shoulder (not that I’m complaining).

All the while, people were trying their best to push their energy into the field, which showed results soon. Within minutes, Argentina scored something which I still couldn’t believe after watching hundreds of replays. The telepathic passing making me suddenly go back to the Tiki Taka days of Barcelona in the early 2010s suddenly emerged. Messi attempted tapping the ball into the net after a succession of passes but the ball was kicked out by the French defence. The stadium emitted confused noises and we checked with each other, only to be told in the next 30 seconds that it was indeed a goal. Couldn’t be happier!

Then Mbappe went full steam and won yet another penalty while others looked up in disbelief. The score was 3-3 and it was the Final and Mbappe scored a hattrick. Martinez pulled off a crucial save from Mbappe in the very last minutes which led our hearts right into our throats, but the scoreline remained intact. We were looking at the clock for a penalty shootout.

Lucky for us, the shootout happened at our side because Messi won the penalty toss (God had made up his mind). The kicks went on, one after another. Martinez was able to save two of them. Then Montiel stepped in, and I have the rest on video.

Screams and wails all around. Your heart had to be of stone if you didn’t cry as the greatest of all time went on and finally “shaken hands with paradise”. The whole stadium erupted, all 88,000 of them were on their feet. I don’t think even the French had much to say about that.

The Argentinian chants still ring loud in my ear:

Vamos Argentina
Sabes que yo te quiero
Hoy hay que ganar y ser primero
Esta hinchada loca, dejó todo por la copa
La que tiene a Messi y Maradona
Ponga huevo, vaya al frente, Argentina
Ponga huevo, vaya al frente, jugadores
Este año tenemos que dar la vuelta
No’ vinimo’ todo’ a Doha a ser campeones

(Let’s go, Argentina
You know that I love you
Today we have to win and be first
This crazy crowd gave everything for the cup
The one [the crowd/country] that has Messi and Maradona
Put some balls into it, go forward, Argentina
Put some balls into it, go forward, players
This year we have to do the lap [the victory lap with the trophy]
We all came to Doha to be champions)

Chants that filled the stadium before the match started only grew louder. Guess they knew they were the winners all along.

The trophy ceremony came up, and Messi got what was truly his.

Thanks for reading this all the way to the end. This is not a typical post on this newsletter, but I’ve been meaning to write this ever since the last World Cup ended and before this one started. Been putting it off for so long but I’m happy that I managed to push it out, even if I was a little late!

On a sidenote: major announcements on the way. For now I’ll just say that you’ll see a lot more getting posted here than usual. If you’d like to follow along for hot takes on tech, culture and India, do consider subscribing!

In case you didn't notice, it has already been more than a year since the very viral "Studio Ghibli" trend came out of ChatGPT's image-gen updates. It was something that the world had never seen before. Even Sam Altman, the CEO, was shocked to see such a response, to which he had to say this:

As someone who loved playing with (and jailbreaking) AI models since the GPT-3 days, I was pretty excited about generating Studio Ghibli images myself. Like many other thrifty Free users of ChatGPT, who’ll create 10 accounts but won’t pay for a single one of them, I remember being utterly disappointed. I couldn’t use any of the ten accounts to generate a single such image because there were too many people doing the same. Indian internet consumers are probably the second biggest reason why rate limits exist. The first? Their AI agents!

On the flip side, we had people who were angry about this trend, including the man behind Studio Ghibli itself — Hayao Miyazaki.

To them, this was clearly a breach of IP (which it was) and a stale attempt at copying something users didn’t really understand, and obviously something which was getting made all too conveniently. The slop factory was real and ChatGPT’s business was booming. Those on the other side of the ring put up lawsuits, conducted petitions and protests, and did everything they could to stop any further developments on Artificial Intelligence as a branch of study. A month ago, Molotov cocktails were thrown at Sam Altman’s home in the middle of the night. Telling that you work in tech attracts more side-eyes these days than phone numbers at house parties.

If you didn’t notice yet, everything on the web these days seems AI-generated. Which might not even be that far from the truth. A study from Ahrefs in March 2025 showed that 3 out of 4 webpages on the internet now have at least some AI-generated content. And this was before Claude Code was public and OpenClaw wasn’t really a concept! Imagine this ratio today.

However, there’s another angle to this debate, which plays to people’s inherently tribal brains.

Richard Nadler, a German artist, faced immediate backlash on his work as soon as people learned that he’s a “generative AI artist”. All of a sudden, the work which seemed so surreal and beautiful, became a bunch of crap and AI-generated fluff that people were not ready to engage with at all.

Anything these days created with the help of AI, even remotely so, is dismissed as slop without any further discussion.

A sloppy and convenient statement hidden behind a guise of intellectualism, oh the irony! If AI is the culprit behind slop, and curtailing its use is what leads to “original ideas”, does it sound fair that no slop existed on the internet before ChatGPT existed?

Are you really sure about that?

Let’s look at the definition of slop as per the Cambridge dictionary.

And mind you this has been a word which has been around well before AI was a buzzword. Although, the word’s been more in use recently for very obvious reasons.

It’s safe to say that slop was indeed a thing before ChatGPT came out. The volume of production of slop, however, is accelerated a lot more as it becomes easy to make things which are based off some other thing that someone saw on the internet.

But what makes slop so sloppy?

In early 2025, my little brother Akshit also published his post on AI slop and how the absence of friction of creating something worthwhile robs it off its greatness. He’s inconsistent but he’s a far more entertaining writer than I could ever be. Check it out!

Akshit’s Substack

The Great Ghiblification Gambit – How AI Art Will Smother Creativity in Its Sleep

Well now, this isn’t exactly the sort of topic that breeds controversy. No torch-waving mobs have assembled (yet) in defense of AI-generated art, no solemn declarations of war from the Grand Guild of Prompt Engineers. Most people, however, will be thoroughly irritated by an article headlined in this manner…

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a year ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · Akshit Sahu

But the point he makes in his essay is essentially what I want to project. Which is: anything that hits like free dopamine but is born without the inherent struggle of being an artist, is what’s slop. What lacks effort, clearly shows lacking effort.

The nuance I’d like to add that is that sloppiness is not a debate of whether or not AI was used in the production of that artefact. It’s more to do with the level of attention given at the time of production, at the time of consumption and the real intent behind creating the said artefact (which is usually appeasing the algorithm gods).

It’s indeed true that AI models are getting better and sharper at following your direction — whatever and how noble it may be, and for very long periods of time. With some configuration they’re able to generate 1:1 clones of websites (nowadays even APIs) but they inherently lack a sense of direction.

It’s funny to say that it takes a hell lot of time to produce anything meaningful beyond the clone from AI. If you’re someone serious about your work, and you think you’re good at what you do, you’ll feel the urge of not involving AI into your work when you start out, or at least critiquing what AI has generated pretty harshly. That’s why it takes so long to get to the right answer with AI, a good one takes two sentences and a minute.

If you haven’t already noticed, all “knowledge work” is a byproduct of two aspects:

• your ideas (original or inspired)

• the mundane steps of getting there

Someone may argue that the mindless mundanity of bringing your ideas to life is “inefficient” and therefore should be weeded out. But sometimes these steps give you the necessary friction to keep at it and produce more original work. I still prefer sketching out first ideas on paper for my posts and designers still use Figma even if they can now code.

On the flipside, there are also some things that are notoriously mundane, such as writing boilerplate code for a Next.js app, wetting your canvas before you paint or sound checks on stage which can run upto several hours at a time. Sometimes your creative endeavour of getting to a place with your art is lost on you as a result of this “boring” process. As a result the floor of production is already so damn high that a lot of people with amazing app ideas may not build them, or the rapper with a beat in her head may never be able to get it out into the world.

That’s where AI is helping people. It’s helping them to at least get started, and get their production to a level that helps people be less embarrassed about their first drafts.

But is building things using AI akin to life on easy mode? I beg to differ.

Now that everyone’s able to build a solid v0 of their idea, it’s taking so much more from artists to raise the bar to a degree where AI can’t even judge them probably, let alone help them create. The ceiling is rising to abnormally high levels. New records, new apps, new visualizations — so much fun!

Artists like Nadler are embracing these new tools with open arms and are pushing the boundaries of what's possible in digital art. When asked about his process of creating his beautiful visualizations, here's what he had to say:

tl;dr

He starts from personal memories and hand-drawn sketches, then feeds them into a custom AI model he co-trained with a technical collaborator. He then iterates daily for months (new prompts, new reference images, fine-tuning), generating thousands of outputs through trial and error, before curating down to ~128 final pieces with help from platform curators.

You tell me — does that look like slop to you?

There was a time when electronic artists who relied on sampling from existing tracks and mixing over them, were considered indecent. Heck, I don’t have to go that far, even I thought that it was cheap and unoriginal to take an existing track and mix it up. When my friend introduced me to Kanye West, I scorned at his work (oh wow I so hate myself).

But then, he showed me a video of breaking down his sample, I was impressed. I also learned that Linkin Park were genius samplers, most notably, the intro from Faint was lifted and shifted from the James Bond franchise’s From Russia with Love. I was floored.

As someone who started exploring these tools for production, I was genuinely amazed and relieved that human creativity can breed anywhere if given enough space and the right constraints. The bar keeps getting higher.

Could we have seen Kanye without sampling? Could we have had Charlie Puth and Jacob Collier and Billie Eilish and FINNEAS producing banger albums from their bedrooms and winning Grammies? Could we have seen artists like Nadler sharing their beautiful work without AI? OF COURSE NOT.

My entire argument is - slop is sloppy just like water is wet. The models may get better at producing one-shot outputs, which just means that more people will be able to do the same. What you make on the first pass will almost always not stand out, which means that you’re at your baseline and there’s only one way to go. The tech always raises the floor but pushes the ceiling even higher.

The tools that you see around you: be it coding agents, design tools or research assistants are still pretty novel and are as bad as they’ll ever be. As the tech matures (which is going to at least take 5-10 years as we understand modalities and best human-computer interfaces for the new era), we’ll see new frontiers getting unlocked. We don’t even know what’s possible and what kind of advancements we’ll make in critical domains like medical research and nuclear physics.

Tigerfeathers

Dognosis: Unleashing Canine Superpowers

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4 months ago · 42 likes · 18 comments · Rahul Sanghi

But as of now, technology, as it has been all this while, the great equalizer. Love it or hate it, more people will now have access to do things which only experts could. That may mean that some “experts” will no longer be needed in places where they were needed before, but the bar for the top 10% in any field has gone up higher than ever. The experts who can argue about machine output confidently need more command on their craft, and the value on their craft has gone up by about a 100x of what it was before. The average man often doesn’t need their expert advice in a simple hobby project, but the man can aspire to get to a standard which is at least 50% of what his masters did. Which is all that matters.

Yes, the models always produced sloppy output until a while back. Will Smith wasn’t able to get his ramen into his mouth for quite a few years. But if you’ve been following the developments that Higgsfield AI have been making in film production, you’d need to lift your jaw up from the floor.

The entire deal is this: computers, for the first time in human history, killed the effort that it took to produce multiple copies of the same digital file by being able to replicate it for an infinite number of times, helping creators around the world build so much good stuff and still earn a living off it. The new tools at our disposal now make it easy to replicate ideas, workflows, constraints, and remix them into artefacts which look ever-so slightly different and more “customized” to a particular situation.

The ways of working you build give compounded returns. But the foundations are still the same: for you to be able to produce anything worth producing, you need to have the depth of knowledge in the domain you’re labelling yourself an expert. Being a “shallow master” will not cut it anymore.

The economic value still lies in the deterministic part in the production of anything AI generated. Models in of themselves are quickly becoming a commodity. That’s also the reason why we see OpenAI and Anthropic rushing to grab businesses by first starting with Forward-Deployed Engineers and now moving to full-blown services. Are they trying to be the new TCS?

As for slop production, yes, that’s still a problem. But that’s more because our existing social media paradigms are not attuned to the new reality of someone being able to “crack the algorithm” once and then repeating it a thousand times for financial gains.

The playbook to going viral is now contained in a cron job. Use the same template that has made you successful and publish posts on a schedule. Not bad for someone who’d like to be famous on the internet, no? The rules for engagement-baiting as defined by social media platforms are the very incentive behind the generation of slop. If slop wasn’t commerically successful, we wouldn’t have seen any of it, even before AI was around in its current shape and form.

To wrap it all up, and I’ll say it again: slop is a problem. It always has been. But to make AI the culprit instead of questioning why people would be interesting in generating slop in the first place (in the hopes of pleasing yet another AI overlord) is where we lose the plot.

We’ve already started putting AI to good use in medicine, research and helping people who were limited by their skill in web development to build cool apps. Yes, v0 has become easier to manufacture but it’s just that: the first cut. Good if you’re happy with it. But getting to a level where you can produce marvels from the new technology takes as much time, if not more.

With that said...

Cheers,
Samyak

Note: AI was only used for research on this post. I intend to keep it that way, idk for how long…

07:23 hrs

My day started a little earlier than usual. Let’s go! I’ll most certainly nail it this time. After all, I’ve kept a note of what to do and what not to do from the previous week, and month, and a few months before it. I don’t really know what happened to the last year’s note.

The day started well. I got a head start. Did I tell you that I woke up earlier than usual? Well there was something I did in between which I don’t clearly remember anymore, that led me to getting ready only by my usual time. All that I remember is a slurry of notifications, texts, emails and deadlines the moment I rubbed my eyes and peeked at my phone as I was taking the morning dump.

Okay, I’m ready to own this day. I’m ready to cross off the first three high-priority items from my to-do list. But for some reason I don’t feel like it. I feel hollow. I already feel tired. I haven’t even started!

I panic. I remember my biology lessons from school. Adrenaline leads to three kinds of responses – fight, flight, freeze.

I’m frozen – by exhaustion, indecision. By the exhaustion of not being able to take any firm decisions. The only “quick fix” I see to this is to get validation for how I feel through relatable memes on Instagram or “yes, you’re absolutely right”-type messages by ChatGPT.

I look back up at the clock. I’m sure I’ve seen it more times, but still this time feels like my second since I woke up. It’s 2:30 pm already! What am I even doing? There’s so much cringe content on my feed today, I hate it. Someone’s marriage, someone’s trip – none of whom I’ve talked to in the last 5 years. Why am I still watching it? Sure this day has gone to waste. There’s nothing I could do about it now. What’s worst? It’s 2:32 pm already. Which only means one thing – it’s ‘chill time’ as per my calendar. The day’s more than half-spoilt, what’s even the point of recovering what remains?

My afternoon doomscrolling session leaves me angry – about the state of the world and my own. I can only feel my blood boiling at the recent story she posted with her new BF (who’ll tell me she was single for sometime?! wdym to say that I never had a chance?) . But I have no energy to fight back, to do anything about it. Not my fortune, not my cookie. Fortune cookies are fake anyway.

Only now do I think that minimizing losses was probably a better idea than YOLO-ing the day. I’m losing my mind not as pixie dust, but in big crumbs. Crumbs... she didn’t leave no crumbs behind. She’s another she BTW. Who cares? There are bigger things to do. I’m not even doing anything about them, though.

If I can’t fix the day, let me do something that doesn’t make me feel too bad about it. Ek kaam karta hoon, so jaata hoon. The sunset signalling the end of the day will feel kinda depressing, let’s avoid it altogether. Modern problems require modern solutions.

Right before sleeping I was angry, which soon turned into grave disappointment when I realized I was already through 1352 weeks of my life, and if I live up to 80 (which could be way off), I have some 2823 weeks more, all thanks to this widget that I found online. Someone on X also mentioned that 24 is basically half of your life done, as your perception of time keeps accelerating as you grow older. This put me in a state of dismissive panic, I dusted it off my shoulders and submitted myself to my soft bed.

I woke up to the cacophony of dogs in the park and their multifarious tongues... wait what!? Where have I heard that? Oh yes, that was the video that I was watching before I felt asleep. I feel fresh after waking up though, let me save the little that the day has for me.

My brain felt much slower, in a good way. I was able to notice my stream of consciousness. Maybe some rest is what I needed. Maybe bingeing on that new season of The Boys with the boys over Discord on sips of beer wasn’t a good idea after all. Maybe I’m just too fragile and not cut for what’s “normal”.

I prop up on my bed and pick up an old diary collecting dust on my shelf. I didn’t notice it for a very long time. I crack it open to see some of my old poems that won me competitions. There were some better ones that didn’t meet anyone but me, I felt too awkward sharing them out in the public. Bowing to the recent 2016 trend, I looked at a poem and thought back to myself:

Will the kid in me be proud of what he’s become after 10 years?

It doesn’t feel like that in the moment, but I’ve sure done some objectively good things. Getting through one of the best engineering colleges of the country, challenging my introversion and making true friends, getting into a job people usually dream of, secretly plotting to get out of it to pursue even bigger dreams. To the outside world, I seem like a “sorted” guy. Maybe the others who look as sorted to me are just better hiding the whirlpool that’s their mind?

I opened my journal and started writing...

…

After all, I *know* what's exactly been up with my mind. The surprise-evoking neurotransmitters (dopamine/noradrenaline) numb my brain and my energy is constantly squeezed out of my body like ketchup from an empty plastic bottle. Submitting myself to the little multicoloured LEDs covered by a pane of glass, especially late in the night puts in a state of wakefulness. I've (unknowingly) engineered my surroundings to remain wakeful and confused, such that I remain dazed and confused when I'm actually needed by the world.

I make up for my lack of socialization by being active in Reddit communities and Instagram accounts of unknown faces and intents. The neurotransmitters responsible for the feeling of belongingness (oxytocin) hold onto their chances of going all out at that one person who disagreed with my *kind* in the comment section of that reel. Connection without connection.

What is it if it's not a self-inflicting wound - something that gets widened before its healed? How can I complain about the noise when I simply expect to hear some music by just turning up the volume? The worst part is, however, that the mind is bad at reading itself. For it to be able to do that, it needs to turn off any external stimulation.

For we don’t rise up to the levels of our expectations, we fall back to the levels of our systems (Adam Grant). The problem is that our expectations from ourselves are inflated while our systems are breaking apart - all thanks to this little pandora box of distraction. Could we not do something about it?

…

All that and a lot more thoughts (about the future of politics in this country and the ‘crumbs’ ofc), and it’s 2:30 am already. Hey, at least I feel ready for what lies ahead of me for the day, even if there’s no time left. I submit to doomscrolling and responding to the texts of my friends as we relate to the sad-boi hour reels and there’s yet another day, just like this one, waiting for me on the other side.

My younger self would be so proud of me, one day for sure...

That was my most ADHD-pilled post on this Substack (till date) and was quite fun to write!

Thanks for making it all the way to the end. This essay was written as part of a collaborative exercise with fellow writers in the Delhi NCR Substack group.

Here are some others (which are much more coherent) you should definitely check out!

1. … and how I slowly learned to quiet it within by

2. One that refuses to leave and the one I invited in by

3. What does ‘Synthesis’ even mean? by

4. Treasoned Hero by

5. Noise by

• This was our first month of ops at Masala Dew. The original vision suddenly not only seems achievable, but inevitable. If not us, someone else would go on and do it.

• When I said “we/us” whenever I mentioned what’s happening at our company this month, I meant me and my agents. And no, I don’t feel weird about it at all.

• Increasingly getting happier about my decision to move out of Bangalore and avoid the doomerism encapsulating the tech world. We’re living in a wonderful country: so many unsolved problems and opportunities that lie outside of the blr/sf tech bubble.

• Frontier labs are hyperfocussed on developer tooling, which is good news to anyone who’s building outside of that market. A quick stroll through the markets of Delhi will tell you that there’s SO much more to be built

• Shitty models work like shit even on good harnesses. Good models work amazing on excellent harnesses. It’s often better to spend more on SOTA models than to waste time weeping over crap produced by a “cost-effective” configuration.

• Everything’s about writing text files and executing them - which is why frontier labs are hellbent on getting it right. But new capability only makes new businesses possible, it doesn’t automatically make them happen.

• I went (really) deep into the rabbithole of new AI tools this month, dug through almost every kind of hot new thing that has come in the market - upgraded to a Claude Max subscription and got converted to a Paper Pro user within the first two days of using it. My wallet’s weeping rn

• Our goal for this month was to develop that “execution muscle” and try out the breadth of tools that exist to ship. But you don’t always need the perfect tool for every little thing - some of the most productive people are building stuff out of copy-pasting stuff from ChatGPT.

• That being said, well-crafted tools do help. Both in getting stuff done faster, and also in giving inspiration on what’s possible to build now. There’s a delicate balance here.

• Open source is showing a lot of promise, it may soon become one of the best ways to generate distribution on products, esp tools used by passionate builders

• Still been procrastinating for stupid reasons; not being able to install Linux made me procrastinate on setting up OpenClaw. Old habits die hard.

• Quite inspired to see a lot of my friends starting up or on the fence about it: someone’s gotta create all the lost jobs, and so many more!

• There are a lot of things to work on for the coming month - legal entity, tighter org structure, getting closer to our go-live date. Not being too hard on myself as we’re in the middle of a seismic shift on how software gets shipped and distributed, and still personally adjusting to the cadence of working nights and weekends after being in a traditional corporate structure for so long

• aur kya kya karwaoge iss nanhi si jaan se?

Stealing this idea from ’s post on Riffle Studio. In my defense I had thought of it earlier but missed doing it several times. There’s a world of difference between thinking about something and actually doing it. That may just be the key takeaway of this post :)

I love to read, but I’m one of those guys who’d catalog any book whose cover looks interesting, or is recommended by someone I admire, on Goodreads (lately Fable) and never look back at it again.

And instead of solving that problem (by perhaps cataloging less and reading more), I decided to make it worse by building such a book catalog for myself over Obsidian. Maybe there’d be a threshold on the number of to-read books that will then push me towards actually reading them? Who knows...

And why Obsidian? Oh boy, I’m having so much fun using it lately. I’ll speak more to it later.

My approach to this was to build an Obsidian Base (basically a database of sorts) and make it look like a library where I can add reviews, other related artefacts and use the absurd number of CLI tools to do other fun things.

Here’s how I did it - it took me < 20 mins to be set up with everything, most of which were spent fixing a nasty bug around displaying book covers.

Some background before we start

I wanted to push Claude Code to the limit. So instead of giving it step-by-step instructions and proper context files across a project (as I’d normally do for a small coding project), I felt ambitious and decided to one-shot it.

I spun up Claude Code on my terminal and decided to build this base without even touching the Obsidian app.

The pre-requisites for this project were:

• Claude Code (Pro subscription is more than sufficient for this)

• Obsidian CLI

• Obsidian Sync (which is a paid subscription but there are also free-but-less-convenient ways of doing it) + app on Android

Essentially the Obsidian CLI allows Claude Code to understand what Obsidian is and how to use it autonomously.

CLIs or Command-Line Interfaces, allow the user (human/AI agent) to send instructions to an app directly. They’re taking over as the de-facto way to interact with any app (local/cloud-hosted) as Claude Code can do anything you can do by directly talking to the app in the terminal over a CLI.

The first CLIs appeared in the 1970s as a way to send instructions to the computer, before interactive GUIs were even a thing. This reminded me of this Substack Note that I made a long time back.

I won’t go into much detail about the setup process, you may look into the docs or ask Claude Code for instructions if you’ve been feeling lazy about it.

Here’s how it went

Since I had all the tools I need, I felt confident to use a single prompt and be done building the library.

Also, knowing that we’d need to fetch a lot of assets from the web for this, and to ensure that we have a context window large enough to accomodate all of that information, I decided to go ahead with the Claude Opus 4.6 model for this task. This was atypical of me as I typically use Sonnet (and sometimes even Haiku) for most of my tasks to save costs.

Here’s the exact prompt that I used:

Note that there’s none of that “imagine you’re a world class developer” kind of a crap. With the AI models getting so good, they can take offense at you telling them who they are.

(urghhh, well...)

I’m glad I used Opus for it, because even though the script logic was not too long, and Sonnet would be easily able to handle this stuff, but there were about 94 links and I wanted accurate reproduction of all the links in the Python script that Claude Code would use.

So if you know that there are going to be a lot of lines of code getting written for a single task (in this case, Claude simply pushed the 100+ line Python script directly into bash), it’s better to go with one of the larger models at your disposal to minimize risk of hallucinate/typos that smaller models tend to make more of.

In the first go, this is what I got:

Hmm we’re almost there but something seems off... Where are the book covers? When I clicked on one of the book listings, I could see the cover but it was not appearing properly here.

But my lazy bum didn’t want to find out the issue, and instead used Claude Haiku 4.6 as I had spent a large chunk of my tokens already.

But here’s where I got stuck - the model tried tinkering with link types and even went ahead to add book covers off Amazon directly. It correctly identified a YAML parsing error but it went about in circles even confusing me what’s wrong with the project. 15 minutes down the drain with no new development.

I took a breath, spun up Opus again (with high /effort this time around), and this time instead of merely telling it what to fix, gave it more specific sources to look up. Obsidian Forum is a place I knew people have such discussions and CLI documentation can be reviewed. Here’s the final prompt that I gave it to seal the deal.

Maybe it was the detailed prompt or the change of model and a higher effort setting, that Opus patiently took its time to go through multiple forum pages and CLI documentation and realized that we had defined images as text instead! Something that I had guessed earlier but was too lazy to tell.

My experience with models during coding/any kind of knowledge tasks so far:

• Smaller models (like the Haiku 4.6) can often give you a faster output, burn less tokens and are ideal if you also are invoking tools instead of making the model write everything on its own

• Larger models (like the Opus 4.6), especially the best coding models, use their large context windows to ingest all the files at their disposal and properly reason through them before giving out an answer. They burn a shit ton of tokens (and possibly sip more water per call)

Here’s the final result. I’m more than happy with it though!

The “digital library” also looks good on mobile. Note that you should install Obsidian on your phone + set up sync (either through the official route or one of the many unofficial ways) for this to work.

Each link when clicked leads you to a free form book page, where you can add reviews and create wikilinks with other documents in your vault.

It’s offline first, which means that this catalog lives exclusively on your devices and on no third-party servers. You can access it even with a patchy internet connection. It’s also a good idea to stow away your internet devices if you’re trying to read deeply ;)

Finally, I’d like to remind how amazing these tools are: they have the ability to eliminate friction between thought and getting things to action in a very powerful way.

But it's also very clear that this is just a quick turnaround project. A proper book cataloging app requires so much more: UX, auth, cloud storage, social graphs. There are some alternatives, but none of them are both actively maintained and non-bloated at the same time. The best-looking one (Margins) is iOS only. If you're thinking about this space, as a builder, a reader, or both, I'd love to hear from you.

If you’ve come this far, I appreciate you and bless your attention span. For any more thoughts/feedback, my DMs are always open.

Cheers,
Samyak

...but now the Indian dream is to stay back and build something here that makes people want to stay. And we’re just getting started.

This reminded me of another clip by IIP (Ashris Choudhury) where a 20 y/o boy by the name of TN Subramaniam is seen talking highly about India (clipped at the bottom of this post) and how he’d choose to stay and be a part of the Indian growth story1.

Maybe it was that I was watching these videos at about 2 AM on a Monday, or my latent feelings about belonging, that this hit me harder than it would a few years back.

After all, what we’re trying to do at Masala Dew is to build software that taps into Indian culture, gets inspired by it and shapes it in a way nobody ever thought of doing before (even if some of these products sure did shape our cultural fabric inadvertently2). We want to build things that feel awesome, which gives our users a sense of connection about using something which was built from here, for here and beyond.

Products built in India can very well serve the world, just as they can serve the variety that is the Indian population – dozens of languages, hundreds of dialects, gazillions of dreams and aspirations.

As my friend says, “People vote with their feet”3. The best marker of success of Indian products is that people choose to stay with our digital goods, and find innate joy and satisfaction in using Indian clothes, driving on Indian roads and proudly stating their association with this country wherever they go. In other words, they vote with their valuable time and attention and deliberately choose to stay with us.

Our best talent in the domains of sports, scientific research, music and “just people” who’re looking to live a good life, should be able to find a home in our country and should be able to live here better than anywhere else in this world.

For those who reside outside this landmass may still be able to see the cultural narrative that speaks volumes about our own creativity as we craft our own tools and thereby our tools help us create more of that craft.

Therefore one of the key markers of success for an Indian brand like Masala Dew (and the dozens that will mushroom in the decade to follow) would be that we’re able to make them stay — both in the sense of software metrics (retention, engagement — plays on attention and time) and geographically (as in, opportunity to do great things).

Make them stay — in the hopes of being able to do something about this country, of being able to get back from it. Of feeling worthy of love and dignity in this country that we call home.

To make this happen, some of us will need to stay back and build while others look for an escape. We’ll need to address the root causes head-on, and make staying back the superior choice, both rationally and emotionally. We can draw on the knowledge of those who are out and away, to help us understand how things could be better for all of us, and for the world at large.

Oh yes, that’s the dream. Stay back and make them stay.

2

Think WhatsApp:

The India Notes 🇮🇳

WhatsApp owns India!

India’s most used business software isn’t chosen - it’s tolerated…

Read more

10 months ago · 234 likes · 21 comments · Dharmesh Ba

Love abundantly, given time and attention are your only constraints. Marvel at God's creations. Pay homage to them by making your own things!

To love is to live. Love everyone, but most importantly, love yourself. When you love something, you take care of it with absolute agency. You take actions to improve the quality of existence of that thing. Money buys freedom. It buys the leverage that help you make multiple times the impact that you could've made otherwise. Technology is also such a leverage multiplier. Don't be consumed by them, but use them to live well.

If you find yourselves questioning your existence or the world at large, it's probably because you're not loving enough. Let go of your guard and allow yourselves to fall: care hard for people and things and you'll find yourselves longing to stay with the things you love forever.

The meaning of life is to give life meaning.

— Victor Frankl

Remember last year? That’s when I made my last post.1

I wrote a post on what Product Management is. I promised I’d do a follow-up on how will my role change with the coming times. Turns out, I wasn’t kidding! Even I’m surprised that I’m writing a sequel, after several failed promises.2

Note that whatever I say in the rest of this article should not be interpreted as anything beyond informed speculation, and is purely based on my experience working with these new tools so far. These views are personal, and in no way are linked to what my employer says or suggests.

You gotta be safe in these times, you know?

Now, here comes the fun part...

This is for my friends with shitty attention spans.

Will AI eat away my job?

1-mark answer: no.

2-mark answer: no, but I know that my role’s gonna change greatly over the next 3-5 years. The fundamentals of what a PM does are going to get more visible and impactful.

For the 20-mark answer, read on…

People are either too excited or too scared about AI and the way it might displace them.

However, to think of things from that angle (i.e. AI is being developed to replace humans and the jobs they do) is a wrong way to approach it.

Between the time I posted the prequel of this post till date, there have been several takes on the future of Product Management by some stalwarts on this topic. I’ll link to their takes towards the end of this post.

But I want to use this space to center this discussion to what would happen to our kind, especially to the Product Managers in India. But what I’m saying is pretty generic and should apply to everyone under the sun, including all sorts of knowledge workers (tech and non-tech).

A short view back to the past...

For those who don’t watch F1 and are not aware of this meme, I got you...

When I began my previous article (again, here if you haven’t read it already), I quote from his post on Product Management, where he mentions,

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

Then I went on to mention that Product Managers are paid for the leverage that they generate with their work. The kind of effort they put in towards the job is only as valuable as the output that they generate for their team.

In that sense, PMs already have a headstart as compared to the other jobs on the market, which traditionally involve submitting deliverables (code, designs, copies) for income.

Also, in that post, I tried putting all the knowledge work that anyone does through this (oversimplified) formula.

This equation will be the central thesis of today’s discussion.

Some hard facts

Love it or hate it, we live in a capitalist society. Turning around a profit is the most generous thing you can do for the world.3

If you remember third-grade mathematics, profit = selling price - cost price of anything you build.

Basically, it should cost you less than what you’re selling the item for to profit and keep running your business.

In the anticipation of turning around a profit, you recruit people who can find what should you build and how should you go about changing it4 to be able to stay relevant.

So, as a software business, you recruit people who can ideate, develop, grow and evaluate software solutions for you. You increase the cost of operations just so you can turn around a greater outcome which will (hopefully) more than cover the cost borne by hiring.

In terms of the direction of progress, most businesses profit by giving the world tools to slow down time or speed it up.5

When we say slowing down time, we mean to entertain, to pleasure, to make times worth remembering. When we talk about speeding up, it usually means skipping to the good part: by reducing the time it takes to build something, heal someone or just any job done.

With me, so far?

I don’t want to get political, but no business stands to benefit by hiring more people to do the same job. You may hire them for goodwill, but as a business, if you really wanna make it, you’ll try and make sure you’re getting the most out of the fixed number of people you’ve hired.

And that’s why we get all so existential about AI: we fear that it can take our job because we believe that businesses can go on and deliver the same outcomes without us. The businesses we work for, would no longer need us and we’ll eventually be doomed.

I’d go on and say, the fear does sound reasonable, does it not?

Now, where can we go wrong?

Businesses hold no interest in either creating or cutting jobs. May I be bold enough to say that jobs are lost because of a lack of innovation. Because there are no better ideas for the business to pursue. In a thriving organization, the same number of people eventually start looking around for other opportunities to capture the same market and bring out things that were previously deemed to be impossible.

Which means that even though a lot of “programmable” jobs can vanish in the next few years, a smart business will try to juice out more creativity out of the people they already have in their org without necessarily needing to shrink down.

But before going off another tangent, I want to refocus our discussion on the multipliers of knowledge work and how I see them changing.

Knowledge work
= Labour x Leverage x Taste

Labour

With AI going berserk, completing tasks, keeping an eye for any changes to instructions – I anticipate the labour part of this equation to dwindle with improvements to AI. A new element, which is purely managerial — orchestration — becomes super important.

That means that all aspects of your job which relate to labour — something as simple as writing a spec or as complex as telling the 10th stakeholder why was the ship date of a certain feature delayed, could be taken care of by AI.

Understanding orchestration is pretty simple. Remember this episode in Tom and Jerry where Tom becomes the conductor of a large orchestra? That’s what most people will end up doing in their day-to-day.

Give instructions to your computer, review the tasks done by it and move on to the next task at hand.

There was a time, which I like to remember as the “ugly middle”, when most of these tools were doing a half-assed job at writing docs or generating code, when people lost interest in them. That was simply because the technology was a good proof of concept, but it was not mature enough to take care of the tasks as promised.

But now, based on my personal experience of using tools like the Dia Browser, Cursor and Rovo’s Jira/Confluence integrations, I’ve seen phenomenal improvements. These tools can write complete code, generate documents and presentations with utmost clarity and help people turn around work without needing to master Excel or Powerpoint or Google Docs.

My best advice to PMs is something that I’ve been following myself for the last year or so: try out new tools unabashedly at work, to the point where they start breaking. Pro tip: don’t tell your colleagues that what you’ve been making is generated by AI. Otherwise they’ll come hounding at you even if the artefact is better than what they could’ve created themselves!6

If I wouldn’t be able to use ChatGPT to create this comic strip, I don’t think I’d have been motivated enough to commission it/hand-draw it and would’ve avoided putting it in this post at all.7

And if your job is defined by the number of hours you put to refine that doc, none of whose inputs are your own, then you’re not really in the right place.

You need to start looking at your work not from the lens of the output that you generate, but the outcomes that you eventually drive in your role.

Leverage

This is where the value of a PM, or for that matter, any kind of manager comes in. You might be working 10 hours a day working on a project for 10 months that only generates $10 in incremental revenue8. As a knowledge worker, in general, that’s not healthy — both in terms of lifestyle and for your career growth.

As a PM, you should look for ways to improve your leverage if you don’t have it already. If your job is to marshal resources to do the job, then marshal them as hard as you can. There are AI agents that could get the job done for you — from copywriting to creating prototypes, from creating custom emails to full-fledged presentations for execs — use all that you have to your advantage.

Get licenses to the most expensive tools your company could afford. In most situations, these tools will cost you a lot less than hiring someone full-time9. Plus, the quality is also kinda standard (see the next section for more on that quality question).

Without technology, more agency typically translated to more labour. With intelligent systems, more agency now means more leverage. More tasks done per minute. Time flies faster, things get done. Money flows in.

Even if you’re an IC (Individual Contributor) and don’t manage a team of people, think of yourself as a manager of agents. Recruit the best of them and see yourselves rising the ranks as someone who can pull bad business out of debt and good businesses straight to the moon!

But leverage is not just about recruiting agents at work. AI can be of limited help here, as influencing your org (especially upwards) will remain a key skill and in fact, get stronger as execution is largely delegated. Soft skills are your friend.

Taste

This is something which makes all the difference between a good and a great PM. And it’s pretty unfortunate to see that people talk about taste all the time and yet under-emphasize/seldom practice it.

People don’t work hard just for the sake of it. The best craftsmen you know — from the Michelangelos to the Linuses of the world — spent extra time in the kitchen because they wanted to cook their meals to perfection. They knew that there’s an ideal state worth striving for, and they wanted to put as many iterations as possible to make sure that the finished product is as per their expectations, and often well beyond what anyone could’ve imagined.

The good and bad thing about AI tools is exactly this. You can get yourself to a passable quality of output with ever-improving models, but it still takes a genius and a shitload of effort to produce something otherworldly. The floor is raised for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that the ceiling is still the same height.

If you think you lack clarity on what needs to get done out of an AI tool, spend time honing your craft manually. Hone attention to detail in such a way that no AI could beat you at what you’re good at. Reviewing roadmaps, codebases, customer feedback — all those are things that could only come about with deliberation.

A good indicator for good taste is when you can argue with a state-of-the-art AI model about the generated output and point out exactly what needs fixing for the output to elevate to the next level with high confidence.

A lot of high-leverage managers have these AI tools under their belt: production is commoditized now. And that’s why we’ll see more attempts at the same market problem, but only one will stick. The one which is the best out there.

For example: in the thousands of productivity apps, Notion stood out. In the thousands of web browsers available in the market, Arc stood out. Both iterated for excellence and tastefulness, and a kind of user quality which makes them hungry for more.

All in all, if I were to flash that ugly equation right before your eyes again (with some modifications)…

This is how I feel things would change for everyone.

Back to the original question

The leading question of this post was whether or not AI will take away my job.

I think it will take away parts of the job that I got good at, where AI will outperform me everytime. These were tasks that I dreaded to do anyway — think generating summaries of meetings or searching for the Confluence docs. Some of these problems are harder to solve than the others, but in the 4-5 year horizon, I lowkey see us getting to a point where humans don’t have to be in loop for these tasks at all.

These tasks, lovingly called b*tchwork, are anyway things I don’t enjoy doing.

However, all I know is that if I’m hired in a company to do b*tchwork, I’ll be easily replaced by a system that does it faster and more reliably. Good news? Yes, for some. Not for many!

The sad reality is a lot of the PMs work as arbiters and delegates for someone who’s not “free enough” to look into the minor details, without adding original inputs to problem statements. Also, I believe when PMs over-index metrics and OKRs without questioning them and thereby trade off the simple rule of Product Management — build something your user wants and is ready to shill a penny for — they should brace themselves for a crash.

If the company you’re deciding to work for is flexible enough to accommodate your (well-reasoned) creative input, is able to work nimbly across tasks, say no to what’s unimportant, only then can they expect to stay at that company and thrive there.

Being able to build an intuition of what my customers want, influence my team to do the right thing and use the (still) limited bandwidth of my product teams is something that is essentially my job. Everything else takes care of itself, as it should’ve already.

The bandwidth which then gets freed up can be used for exploring other domains which were just as important to pursue earlier. There were things that we thought wouldn’t fit as a 3-month long roadmap item, or something truly unimaginable but addresses a key user pain point.

Some of these problems are not pretty and exciting. Think making adjustments to a billing platform which is not prepared for a new product acquisition, which is what decides what gets built in-house v/s what’s acquired — these are critical decisions which need to be taken by humans. High leverage, high cost if things go wrong, but millions of ways to approach this problem. The AI does the work for me, but which route to take would still be decided by me.

The more exposure you have to a range of problem statements, the more you’ll hedge your career. The hedging will come about by improving taste, standards of excellence and simply the craft of building products.

Because at the end of the day, my favourite definition of Product Management is:

The art and science of building the right products for the right users to solve their problems.

And that’s never going out of fashion.

Some interesting takes on this topic

A lot of what I presented above comes from my own experience of seeing product teams run around me, mostly in India. Here are some interesting posts by people I look up to on this topic, which helped me form a more matured opinion on my take above.

• The Ken - Who killed the art of Product Management in India?

This post is inspired by all the genuine (and sometimes rhetoric) questions that people around me ask all the time.

• “So, what do you do for work?”

• “What do you actually do for work?”

• “So you attend meetings, and…?”

• “You got no hard skills, that’s why you chose PM hahaha”

Well, the last one may be true to some degree, but through this post I don’t want to defend what I do. I want to explain my role in the context of the changing times. Knowledge work as we know it, will change, and here’s me thinking out loud how these changes could affect our kind.

This is the first part where I try to explain, in very simple/honest terms and illustrations, what do I do for a living. In the second part, I’ll try to dissect why and how my role won’t look the same in the next few years (and so will yours).

So, what do I really do for a living?

My job title reads: Product Manager1 at Atlassian.

And I’m being honest with you: I get paid a fair bit for whatever I do and sometimes it’s hard for even me to understand why am I even getting anything in a world where engineers code, designers design and salespeople sell.

This is a source of imposter’s syndrome for a lot of people like me: this nagging feeling of we don’t deserve to be where we are.

But here’s what: we’re wired to understand labour but not leverage. That alone makes a world of difference.

But wait, what do I do again?

I earlier used to define my role as “the art and science of building the right products for the right people.” This even has some semblance of truth in it. But it doesn’t go on to explain what I’m exactly responsible for.

I loved this definition by the OG Lenny Rachitsky in his blog post: What is Product Management

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

That’s essentially it. It’s all communication and leverage.

As much as I hate to say it as an engineer-by-degree, PM is very much a business-first role.2

Your job as a PM is to read the users better than they can tell it themselves, and build exactly the product that your company can expect sell them. You have to do everything in power to make sure that happens.

Marshaling resources could mean convincing your business unit that your idea will generate value for the business. It could also mean convincing your engineers that they’re working on the right problems and prioritizing their long to-do list of pending items. It could so as far as disagreeing with your leadership team to say that the strategy that they’ve sketched out sounds good on paper but it’s gonna be a disaster in practice, but you go ahead and do it anyway

So typically in a PM role, there are different seniorities. The more you grow in your role, the more forward-looking you have to be. The more senior you are, the more high-leverage problems you pick up. You grow in your role from owning features to owning product lines.

Example: A junior PM in Google might be responsible of making sure that the Archive feature in Gmail works as expected, a Senior VP might be responsible for the success of the entire Google Workspace suite.

Hold on, what’s this leverage thing you keep talking about?

Glad you asked (or at least I imagined you’d ask).

Leverage is derived from the word lever, which is, simply-put, a see-saw.

If the load were 69 kg, I’d be able to move it even if the fulcrum was in the middle. No, I’m serious about that number.

If the load were 120 kg I’d still be able to (theoretically) move the load if I was allowed to move the fulcrum.

Archimedes said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Again, not sure where he’d order that kind of a lever from, but let’s believe him for a sec for he’s Archimedes at the end of the day.

But in principle, what it means is that you can take up big problems and solve them if you can marshal a group of people (or AI agents3) towards solving it. That’s why the product management role is so valuable in a company, it ensures that a bunch of talented people work on the right problem statements in an aligned, structured manner. Believe it or not, but the larger any company grows, the more structure it needs. And that’s what mandates a PM — ensure alignment, clarity of vision and structure. In other words, make it easy for everyone to understand what we’re building, why we’re building it and how will we structure the solution to solve the problem at hand.

This act of marshaling is neither easy nor is as jolly as it might seem.

• Imagine building a new product because your competitor has done it, and because you’re as big as them. Only to realize that it was such a disaster that despite your best attempts it didn’t amount to much and you had to shut it down (cough Google+4 cough).

• Or that kernel update which went out and wrecked havoc on 8.5 million devices across the globe: freezing banks, delaying flights and effectively sterlizing most of the work PCs running Windows (cough Crowdstrike5 cough).

• Or that AI-based customer support system that resulted in a lot of support staff being laid off, only to be boarded back again because oh it wasn’t working so well after all (cough Klarna6 cough).

To be clear: It’s NOT that these companies were plain careless and over-the-top as it might look from the outside — in fact, they had all the reasons to do what they did. But of the millions of things that could go wrong, a couple did despite the best efforts (except the third one, of course). And that’s all it takes.

Or simply that your engineering, business, design teams are understaffed/unmotivated for any of the million possible reasons — doesn’t matter, it all comes back at you. After all, your team’s performance is eventually your performance.

In essence, a bunch of things can go wrong between ideation, development, deployment and maintenance. You just gotta ensure that things work out as planned. Simple? Maybe. Easy? No.

As as a PM, you’re held responsible for it all.

That’s both a blessing and a curse of being in a role which mostly revolves around communication and decision-making.

In practice, I spend most of my time doing the following:

• Prioritize asks coming in from various people into an easy-to-digest roadmap for our development teams, making adjustments as needed.

• Write requirement docs (what has to be built and why) for product teams.

• Keep checking-in with my engineering, business and design counterparts, either through text or video calls to make sure they’re unstuck.

• Bring up any open questions to relevant forums and initiate a lot of external comms.

• Pitch and prepare team wins, metrics, etc. to report back to leadership.

• Keep an eye out on the what’s going on within the company and in the industry and keep bringing up new things to work on.

• Create and respond to a TON of Jira tickets and Confluence pages.

• Be prepared to be pulled into any leadership escalations where you have to justify why a certain project was delayed by x days/weeks or de-priortized.

If any of those things seem fun to you, yes that’s a part of the job. If any of these sound scary/icky to you, they’re still part of the job and the curse of this thing called leverage — the independence of being able to take decisions on your team’s behalf.

Someone jokingly said in my office: “As a PM you’re the last one to get appreciated when anything goes right, and the first one to be hounded when anything goes wrong.”

Seems like he wasn’t kidding anyway.

Let’s describe this with a real-but-oversimplified example

This one’s a classic.

In my company, I work on the billing engine and experience of our customers, which sees billions of dollars flowing through it every year.

In my role, I was asked to do something to improve the number of customer support tickets that we were getting in any given month so that our support team could breathe and respond to the more important ones.

What I started doing was figure out what kinds of tickets were coming at us and why were they taking so long to respond.

It turns out that the issue was relatively simple; the support team was taking up complex asks from our larger customers, leaving behind tickets which were “low” in priority in their classification. This led to a surge in the number of tickets and a breach of the response time that we assure customer (we’ll get back to you in 1-3 business days, only that our business days were from the moon).

What we started doing was explore an automation which was being used by a different support team and rebuild it according to obey the rules of our billing engine. We allowed the automation to take a first stab at the problem, place an order and respond back to the customer on behalf of the support team.

We faced some issues here and there, but eventually the automation started taking up around 40% of all support tickets. I got promoted (wuhuu).

Okay, enough about me.

I know I haven’t done a very comprehensive job of explaining what did I do to get here and why, but there are a million resources available that will do a far better job at explain those bits to you. Some of my favourites:

• Exponent (YouTube channel — prep-friendly material)

• PM School (YouTube channel — prep-friendly material, Indian context)

• (Podcast, Newsletter (paid) — great speaker lineup and excellent industry insights)

• (Podcast, Newsletter (paid) — practical resources and career advancement stuff)

Just like you all, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this new wave of artificial intelligence and automation will change the way I look at the world. More importantly, how good or bad can it be for me in the short-to-medium term. Should I upskill in my product craft or should I explore setting up a small farm of organic vegetables?

More on that in a post to follow.

I thought of sharing it because of three reasons:

1. AI eating away jobs has not been a post-LLM phenomenon (for context, ChatGPT was launched towards the end of 2022)

2. The effects of AI in almost all sectors have been overestimated by optimists and underestimated by the pessimists. As with all things, we’re currently in the boring middle of things.

3. I’ve not been able to write a lot these days, so I’m pushing out stuff I wrote in the past, just like the Bollywood songs of today which are all recycled garbage versions of the OG songs. At least I’m better because I didn’t publish this yet. Or maybe not, ‘cause this shit’s kinda outdated (but still surprisingly relevant)…

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the topic I was scared to put my thoughts out on my newsletter so far: Eyyy Aaiii 💦

Insert all great things are scary-type quote

Back in London in 1700s, when the mechanized handloom was first invented, people were in an emotionally charged state. I imagine some 16-year old Tom to be fascinated by the working parts of the machine, whereas 45-year old Ed was shit scared seeing the machine as a good reason through which his rich boss would fire him.

Since then, our population has nearly grown tenfold, but the ratio of people dying of hunger is at an all-time low. A lot of people doing manual labour lost their livelihoods, but now we have more people than ever, working way into their seventies, which means that they’ve found more work to do. Per unit impact that people could have created a few hundred years back to now is like comparing an ant’s weight to a flea. Still we can find our own versions of Tom and Ed in our modern society. As they say, some things never change. Most of these universal constants arise from our biology — our perception of fear and excitement has not changed by much over centuries.

There has been a great deal of panic regarding the advent of AI into some of the things people interact with everyday — driving, stock trading, building, curing diseases, designing and even programming. There has been an ever-looming fear that AI’s going to conquer the world in some way, that we’ll become slaves to it. Let’s talk about this existential question later on. For now let’s focus on it’s one of many aspects — employment.

I’d argue that the current deficit of employment is because of two big reasons: lack of skill and upper-level organization. It’s certainly not excess of people, but the excess of people in one narrow domain. With an increasing number of people, there are increasing number of problems. Here’s a hint on the industries that require our attention.

That being said, we have to understand there will always be a demand for humans — humans which have the right set of skills for the right time. We don’t have to work against machines, we have to work with them. Artificial Intelligence, like all the other tools we have, is simply a very powerful tool — who yields it and uses it for what makes all the difference.

This just means that you won’t be paid for heavy lifting. You will instead be paid for what to lift, and how to optimize the method of lifting. Old jobs will perish and new jobs will take its place.

What kind of jobs, you ask? David Epstein in his book ‘Range’ talks about a broader set of skills in combinations no one ever expected, followed by Cal Newport’s advice on working deeply, which has become a rare commodity, to be the best cocktail of traits that we should attack. These could bring more people to the high-value careers they expect. They require some work, they require you work against the tide, but they will end up paying you big, in all currencies. For others, earning enough to put food on your table and sleep soundly should become easier and with the computing power of tomorrow.

At the same time, learning the very intricacies of how things work on the most fundamental level could create new breakthroughs and solve some problems which would otherwise seem impossible to solve by the broad thinker.

All in all, we need both nodes and connectors — some people who can think deeply and some others who can find creative wonder between disciplines. AI will help both of them do better.

I’ve been a bit too occupied with work ever since I came back from my trip, and only now have I been able to make time for this post. More to follow!

Part 1 - Tap & Go!

My favourite feature of the London Tube network (which is a very weird-but-extensive network of trains and buses across the city) is the tap-and-go method of travel.

While Dublin relies on travel cards and cash, in London you can hop onto any bus with your credit card (a real one or something loaded on a phone) and tap “in” without really telling the driver where you wish to go. The same goes for the London subways. When you reach your destination, you must tap “out” to exit the tube station. You are charged for the trip on the next day.

Here’s how it works:

• Your card is read and stored on Transport for London’s (TfL) database through an anonymized identifier

• A temporary authorization charge of ~£0.1 is deducted from the card, which is later adjusted in the fee

• If you’re taking the bus, you’re charged a flat fee of £1.75. If you take another bus within an hour, you won’t be charged extra (as it’s perceived that you’re simply continuing on your journey)

• If you’re taking the metro or a boat, you’ll be charged based on the minimum fare considering the distance, timing (peak v/s non-peak hours), zones crossed, etc. and a weekly cap is applied so that you don’t have to pay too much for travelling too much

• All of these commutes are accrued, and total amount is deducted from the card on the very next day

Also, this is only true of the intra-city tube network, and not the trains run by 4-5 semi-private operators across the UK. I’d like to believe this is because of the unpredictability and high cost of operating trains over the tube. Some things to consider:

• Before taking a train out of the station, you need to estimate the number of bogeys that will go along the driver engine. For that, you need to have at least a rough number of passengers boarding the train

• Train networks don’t see a very high number of regular commuters. Which means that these passengers may be using the trains on a one-off basis, not to use them again in weeks or months.

• If you overestimate the number of passengers, you may increase the cost of fuel burnt*[1] to operate the train on its regular path (because pulling more bogeys will require more energy)

• If you underestimate this number, you run at a risk of poor passenger experience, a lot of them might have to stand on chair cars (happened to me once during a trip from Oxford to London), making it a bad experience even for the passengers who’re sitting on their seats

Even though it doesn’t scale well for inter-city scenarios, this tap-and-pay approach to the intra-city transport has some obvious benefits and some not-so-obvious downsides, and I’m here to give my personal take on each of these.

Finally, I am trying to determine whether this approach is viable for the Indian public transit network and may help boost its usage.

Advantages

1. Easy-peasy

The tap-to-pay system was so convenient and fun to use that I happily paid the extra ~4% forex that my Indian credit card was charging to transact in GBP. I just needed to look up my route on Google Maps and hop on the tube by tapping my phone on the card reader (I used GPay to set up my card, and it worked like a charm).

2. Freedom of price

It’s clear that TfL is more concerned about Londoners using the tube instead of generating the most profit per passenger, as should all public transport services do.

Upper caps on the tube will encourage commonfolk to use more of the service, eventually helping the service stay afloat financially. No matter how far you go, you’d need to pay at most ~₹400 for your bus ride.

This is the only mode of transport which was reasonable within the Indian standards. It’s a steal for someone who’s earning in £££.

A centrally-managed cost structure across the London Tube network provides much room for creativity. Imagine TfL deciding to offer a 50% off for all travelling passengers during national holidays. Such as system could be programmed very easily on the same day because anyway the revenue has to be collected the next day.

3. Rush hour? Move fast!

As the bus driver, if you don’t have to attend a long queue of incoming passengers, asking them where they want to go and handing them a ticket everytime, you’d save up on a lot of time and effort, which you can direct towards keeping the bus on time. This becomes even more important and useful during rush hours.

This especially helps a labour-deficient market like the UK, where you’d typically see the same bus driver:

• Driving the bus

• Stowing passenger luggage

• Helping outsiders through their route-related doubts

• Helping passengers be entertained through some poorly-rehearsed dad jokes

The Europeans have figured out a way to work and live alone. I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it surely helps their case!

4. One card, many places

Going back to the convenience point: the card that I used to pay at the restaurant is the same that I’d use to pay for any of my tube rides across the city. I don’t have to buy a different travel card, create new QRs or purchase physical tickets.

In fact, buying tickets ad-hoc will cost you more in a lot of situations than using your credit card and availing the cost-capping benefits I described earlier.

5. No competition, duh

It also helps that Ubers are goddamn expensive in the UK, and the tube is almost as cheap as commuting in India. You can’t go door-to-door without shelling something like ₹1000-1500 for travelling between two points less than 5 km apart!

True story: I paid £12+ for a 3.5 km ride using an Uber, which would’ve cost me roughly £2 on the double-decker bus! Don’t ask me why I did it.

Disadvantages

1. Once you tap you can’t go back

My friend and I tapped on the Uber boat running across the River Thames, only to realize that the last boat left the shore 30 minutes ago. Since we had already tapped in, we had to make peace with the £1-3 that were to be charged on our cards. Pretty expensive for not going anywhere, innit?

Kinda obvious, but the payment counters should be disabled when the last bus/train/boat has already departed. Having a basic LED monitor which shows how much your card will be charged and whether the stop/port is functional at all could be great, but it doesn’t exist today (for reasons which could also be slyly intentional).

2. Don’t have a credit card? Get one!

For such a system to work and show effects, you need a large number of credit-enabled passengers. If there are passengers who don’t carry their credit card, they need to pay in cash or get themselves an Oyster card. As a tourist with no credit card, that could be a problem, but there’s a baseline expectation of having a tap-to-pay card during your trip to Europe if you’re coming from India.

3. Responsibility on the driver and chances of fuck-ups

This approach can be misused in low-social-trust, high-population societies like the metros of India. Imagine boarding during the rush hour and not tapping in at all. Since London buses typically don’t have a conductor, the driver may not be able to police the passengers, especially if too many of them are too many.

Just for the thrill of it, I was able to get away with a free ride by just climbing on the bus and heading straight to the upper deck of the London double decker. I felt a bit too uncomfortable and guilty to do it a second time though!

No matter what you do, you need a baseline social trust within society for any system to work. I’ve talked about it at length in this essay.

Can we recreate this in India?

Now here’s the million-dollar crore-rupee question: will this system of public transit and payment work in India?

Even though I’d love to see it here, my verdict here would be — not quite, not yet. Not without adjustments, at least.

The reasons behind it are pretty simple:

• Credit penetration in India still lags at about 5-6%, compared to the 62% in the UK. It’s fair to assume that a megapolis like London would easily cross 70%+. Low number of credit cards among the common folk in India means that people won’t be able to avail a lot of benefits of this system

• The variable cost structure and get-charged-next-day features found in the London tube might generate confusion and a lack of trust in the minds of price-sensitive Indian consumers. We put an outsized effort into negotiating for value-for-money over experience, which might not be a bad thing at all — it’s just the way we roll in India!

• Finally, it’s sad to say, but the lack of social trust and well-to-do people trying to haggle away/misuse public resources for the tiniest expenses remains a big problem for the biggest Indian cities. As my friend Mrdul has put it in his essay, fraternity is an immeasurable yet important indicator of a progressive society. Not having a shared sense of responsibility for public goods like buses can deteriorate the experience for everyone over time and burn the system to the ground due to unprofitability. There’s a reason why public transport is frowned upon by anyone who can merely afford a cab. The reasons are also sometimes justified: safety, hygiene, time v/s cost.

That being said, we can still target a robust public transit system; never in the history of this country were buses and metros across Tier-1 cities needed more than today. In fact, foundations for these are being laid across as we speak. Think of these examples:

• Being able to purchase Delhi Metro tickets using WhatsApp

• RuPay NCMC cards that could act as credit cards as well as transit cards

• Multi-mode tickets through ONDC-based Namma Transit and Tummoc, which work in ways very similar to Stockholm’s SL app

I’ll talk more about these and my experience using each of these in posts to follow.

I know this has been quite the post, and no attempt to shorten it could get this under 1500 words. But hey, I hope you enjoyed reading it! If you’d like to nerd over public mobility, feel free to shoot me a DM and we can have a coffee chat in Bangalore or Delhi.

Take care and keep moving!

Cheers,
Samyak

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Indians may hate the British all they want, but there's one thing they did well. Even if it stood to benefit them during that time. It's the introduction of some pieces of modern infrastructure: like trains!

The first rail line between Bombay and Thane was introduced all the way back in 1853. This was barely 22 years after the first rail line in the world was introduced between Liverpool and Manchester. It's important to mention that 22 years in the 1800s were a lot smaller than 22 years in the 2000s purely in terms of technological progress.

So, it's safe to say we had an early bird ticket into this wood-steel-and-coal madness.

Today, India is one of the most well-connected railway systems in the world. It's the fourth-largest network and perhaps the most electrified train networks in the world, with lines and stations scattered everywhere on the map of the country.

In the name of writing discipline and my newfound fascination with trains and city transport in general (tbh I've just gotten bored of flights), I'll be posting some unstructured thoughts and views that I captured from English and Welsh trains during my trip to the UK. There are some big lessons for us, and interestingly, some things that we're doing better already.

I'll compare and contrast how is the process of moving about different for developed countries like those of the UK and Europe, and see if we can derive any lessons from them as a developing nation ourselves. I'll also peek into a few things that we're already doing better than our Western counterparts.

Since I wrote most of this during my train rides in the UK and my flight back to India, I'll focus mainly on the means of transport that I saw in the UK and Ireland in the posts to follow.

Mobility is that ether in our society which is often overlooked when present, but hits hard when it's absent. In the ever-stationary roads of Bangalore and water-clogged streets of Gurgaon, we come to terms with its weaknesses and curse the weather gods and global warming for the puddles and Olympic-sized swimming pools on the main roads of Marathahalli or Sector 32.

In the expansive 8 and 16-lane expressways between Gurgaon/Mumbai or Noida/Agra, we bless the same weather — always making plans for roadtrips and hunting for memories that might last us a lifetime.1

How easily you can move about in a city is a strong determinant of how progressive and vibrant the city is. A still city is a stagnant city, with a lot of hidden potential and perhaps opportunities for new economies. So that's why having this conversation becomes all the more important if we want to assess for our ourselves how good we're doing in the 21st century so far, and what's the direction that we should take to become the “vishwaguru” that we’ve set ourselves to be by 2047.

Fun fact: I started this newsletter titled "Every Place has a Soul" and I wanted to capture cultural aspects of travelling and observing different places. I had just come back from my trip to Finland & Sweden back then. I was fascinated by how people move. The first newsletter topic that I had on my mind was the public transport system of Finland. So, yeah, it's kind of a full-circle moment for me as this topic becomes a Masala Dew conversation.

I'm so excited about the posts to follow2. Let's begin!

Cheers,
Samyak

So, it's the end of something epic.

All of a sudden, the lovely cobblestone streets, the gentle British summer sun, the cool and fragrant breeze, the "thank you" and "sorry"s — all seem to disappear from the front of my senses. My body preps itself for dealing with the brashness, the pollution, the loud horns, and the louder voices as I sit on the EK516 in the Dubai airport.

After a bout of Jack Harlow and The Beatles, AP Dhillon and Shubh mark their return on my playlist. My nostrils give way to the smell of aamchur after conveniently forgetting the sweet smell of hot chocolate of Oxford. My sense of touch and hygiene are somewhat back, as I pull back my socks on the ground, which I could've scaled barefoot without much thought.

All this and more at the Dubai airport, even before my flight takes off.

The two weeks I've spent taking a rather unusual trip to the UK and Ireland is supposed to "transform" me in some profound way, but I'm yet to see any effects. My trip back home should give away any such symptoms of newfound amazingness.

But I'll be real – I dunno why but I feel different. Different in a way I interpret what my senses have already been capturing from the world around. I feel a stronger sense of the time passing by and it feels like I've also grown a little older (this one definitely true!). This trip has helped me conduct myself as the adult as I should now be.

But that's all about me: from now on, at least in the next few posts to follow, I'll try reporting my observations about trains, people, footpaths, music and whatever else caught my attention during my travel time. I'll also talk about how my workation experiment went, and the learnings that came out of it, and what do I really think about remote work (yay, we have a sequel coming in!). I might go into some nerdy trivia-sharing or break into the shayar mode that tries looking everything like it's out of a movie scene (and fails miserably).

All in all, I have a lot to share with y'all, and I can't wait to churn out a few posts for a newsletter that might seem dead to some by now (this is just the start; trust me). As my flight prepares for takeoff, I prepare for what lies ahead of me in India, and will use this space to cherish what I left behind in the British Isles*.1

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For now... Dilli Chalo!

Cheers,
Samyak