The IMF forecasts GDP growth every year. Their forecasts for the current year are slightly low. Their forecasts for the next year are slightly high. After that, it remains high. Some forecasts, like China, Singapore, UAE, Equatorial Guinea are consistently low. Other forecasts, like Japan, Congo, Mexico, Pakistan are consistently high. The interesting meta-pattern is how this sort of past-forecast analysis can be done for any topic. This emerged from an Ethan Mollick post and then I asked: ...

In Tamizh Padam 2 (2018), there’s a parody where Jiiva’s car hits Manobala and kills him: Siva/Iswarya (crying over Manobala) நோ, நோ, சித்தார்த்! சிப்ரோ… மச்சான்… அண்ணா… சித்தார்த்! சித்தார்த்! ஏய்… மச்சான், மூச்சு விடுறா மச்சான்… டேய்… சித்தார்த்! சித்தார்த் வேஸ்ட்-லே போயிட்டேண்டா சித்தார்த்! No, no, Siddharth! Sipro… Buddy… Brother… Siddharth! Siddharth! Hey buddy, breathe buddy… Hey… Siddharth! Siddharth, you went to waste, Siddharth! Jiiva: நீங்க சாங் போயிடுங்க. You should break into a song. Siva: என்ன சொல்றீங்க? What are you saying? ...

The theme of yesterday’s workshop for the IIM Alumni at Singapore was Tools and Workflows was: Agents are getting smarter, so they know what to do. Tools agents can use are growing and are more powerful. This combinatorial explosion creates explosive possibilites. This workshop covered the following six workflows: Leverage transcripts. Use Google AI Studio to transcribe non-sensitive recordings with a reusable “don’t miss anything” prompt. AI Studio’s record button is a ready-to-use transcriber. Simplify dense text as a comic, an infographic, a story. Image generation is now a tool call an agent runs for you. Then compress it as AVIF on Squoosh before you email it to a thousand people. Verify - cheaply. Paste one suffix: “Break this into key claims, mark certainty, flag the five highest-risk ones, and tell me how to verify or falsify each.” Convert to a skill to automate. Cross-checking with multiple models took error from 14% to 0.7%. Skills are assets. A skill tells the agent “here’s how I do stuff.” Build them slowly, edit them weekly, and they compound for years. No skills support in your tool? Keep them as copy-pasteable prompts. Brainstorm by forcing range. Ban the five obvious ideas; borrow from unrelated domains; smash two random concepts together with the Ideator. Hallucination is a feature when you’re being creative. Schedule tasks. Weekly regulatory scans, daily meeting prep, market briefings - and even an “unreasonable gesture” nudge. As AI hides the tech, human relationships gain value. Here’s the talk video and full story + transcript. ...

This week, I learned: It doesn’t always take time to learn or convey things. (Early trust can be built instantly, e.g. vulnerability.) At first, experts don’t know how to make skills explicit. But trainer effort could compress 10X via evals, practice loops, and feedback. Learner elapsed time would compress less. Everyone has something worth discovering, but not every conversation is worth my time right now. So, meet new people with trust, attention, and good questions. Continue if there’s emotional / intellectual stimulation (surprising, interesting, moving, connecting, energizing, challenging), else exit warmly with respect. To avoid getting overwhelmed in ultra-interesting conversations, mental closure helps. During the conversation, pause, name, reflect, and close. “Wait, you’re saying X. I should do Y. I’ll reflect/act tonight.” or “Wow, let’s sit with that for 5 seconds. You mean X. I feel Y. I’ll drop.” After the conversation, summarize: “What struck me were X1, X2. I’ll plan Y1, Y2 and drop Z1, Z2.” Then take a short break. Setting "markdown.editor.updateLinksOnPaste.enabled": false might fix the delay / freezing (infinite spinner) issue when pasting Markdown in VS Code. The bottleneck to quality of AI output has shifted from model quality to harness quality (and this is not obvious to many people). It is important, therefore, to optimize harness usage rather than prompts usage, i.e. harness engineering over context engineering. I use ug --smart-case --bool -Q --sort=rtime to interactively search for text in files. It’s like VS Code search-across-files. Here are the shortcuts I find useful: Alt-g: Glob (filter files to search in) Alt-[ or ]: Decrease or increase context (lines before / after) Alt-w: Word match toggle Alt-c: Count lines toggle Alt-u: Ungroup - show lines once even if multiple matches Using AI for health seems to have reached a tipping point. Three people have pitched an idea in this space to me in the last three days. One is a managed personal health provider who wants to tie-up with hospitals to gather data to improve AI health advice. Second is an enterpreneur who wants to enable the Indian Govt to use AI to improve public health - given the low proportion of trained doctors in public hospitals. The third is a colleague who is uploading personal health reports, fitness data, DNA data, wearable data, etc. and suggest daily habits such as fitness, nutrition, sleep, medication, etc. to optimize health. Changing the topic (e.g. asking a question) instead of answering a question is powerful. It lets you decline requests, avoid sensitive topics, ignore boring ones, learn rather than teach, and bring in your agenda - all at one shot. I need to un-practice my 40-year habit of answering questions. (This is selfish. I forgive myself.) bolt.diy seems like a browser-embeddable coding agent. That is, you can add bolt.diy to your web page and have it build apps. That might be a pretty powerful upgrade to generative UI - where pages build themselves based on the user input. Codex has a few new features in the last few months. Codex can generate images and have voice conversations. /goal sets an overall session goal to avoid getting side-tracked. /side is like Claude Code’s /btw - for a side task while the main task continues. /resume lets you switch to any previous session. /keymap debug lets you edit the keymap and inspect what keystrokes the terminal sends. @ lets you mention files, directories, skills, and plugins. Ctrl+R works, lets you pick a previous prompt. Ctrl+O copies the last answer as Markdown. Hooks are stable. PreToolUse lets you log every tool, SessionStart lets you inject repo-specific rules. MCPs with readOnlyHint can run in parallel. codex doctor diagnoses environment issues. codex remote-control lets you remotely control Codex, making it a server. Codex Python SDK is better and you can have Codex run as a back-end more smoothly. To change others’ behavior, embody (not preach) it visibly and consistently, make it easy to copy, and ask without forcing. It takes time, though. ChatGPT Governance is how groups keep promises when things (people, incentives, environment, pressure) change. A simple way to explain what governance is to someone who doesn’t understand why governance matters, and guide on when it does not matter. Forward Deployed Engineers are the next evolution of data scientists, IMHO. AI can do data science. Data scientists will likely act as the “Human As An Interface” (HaaI) to business, proactively identifying and solving problems - a space business analysts traditionally occupied. Of course, business analysts will likely do the same without needing data scientists to help. But since AI replaces data scientists more than business analysis, I expect that the % of data scientists who become FDEs will be higher than business analysts. The value of data exported from software is high. For example, your email, social posts, CRM / HRMS / ERP dumps, service tickets, purchases, notes etc. These let you create a personal / organizational digital brain. Hence proprietary solutions will make exports harder and open solutions will emerge. To live-preview any publicly accessible Excel file, you can embed or link to https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/embed.aspx?src=YOUR-URL The Codex app can now use the browser much better and faster since last week if you enable “Dev mode” OpenAI. THis uses CDP - which is more efficient than screenshots - and is something Codex CLI has been doing for many months. In Codex, Claude Code, etc. you can submit a prompt while the agent is working to steer it, i.e. after it completes a turn (e.g. a tool call) it will factor in the prompt. You can also queue it. Neither of these is available on ChatGPT or Claude.ai, though it’s such an important feature. On ChatGPT, submitting another prompt stops the previous run and the agent continues with the new prompt. By default, git uses ~/.config/git/ignore or %USERPROFILE%\git\ignore as the global .gitignore. You can override that with git config --global core.excludesFile PATH. StackOverflow

On the Indigo 1163 from Mumbai to Singapore, an air hostess was serving food, which they had to pause just before me because of turbulence. In such cases, I’ve sometimes been skipped in the past, and I usually stay alert for when service resumes. This time, I wasn’t paying attention. But the air hostess walked over right on cue and asked, “Mr. Subramanian, have we served you yet?” She didn’t know. That’s normal. But she checked. That’s not.\ ...

I love that I get uninterrupted 4-16 hours on flights, which I mostly use to write future prompts and read past AI responses. I do miss AI on flights. But after installing Google Edge Gallery with Gemma-4-E2B-it (2.5GB) that runs on my mobile, I’ve solved a few practical problems. For example: I took a picture of a dish they served and asked: “Is this vegetarian?” (It was.) I asked, “Comics have text in panels, often written at the top in a box. Not the speech bubbles. It’s like a narrator or voice over. What are they called?” (Caption boxes.) “Summarize The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Why is it famous?” (Thoughtful, well-written novel on the choice vs commitment tradeoff.) It’s not a very smart model. It’s a bit slow. Transcription is average. It doesn’t run in the background. Only one chat at a time. No internet search, etc. ...

I daydream a lot. One recurring daydream is where I’m a speaker, but the event is so packed with people that I’m not able to enter the hall. The organizers call me, worried, asking where I am. I tell them “I’m outside. I’m not able to get in!” They apologize profusely. “We’ll get you in,” they say. They move out a few people, control the crowd, and manage to get me in. ...

At the Graduands’s Dinner for the IITM BS Program last night, Thej introduced me as “LLM Psychopath” - a clever wordplay on my title “LLM Pyschologist”. Frankly, “LLM Psychopath” seems more accurate! I emotionally abused 40 models in one afternoon. To test whether emotion prompts help, I bullied them (“You are a stupid model… If not, I’ll switch to a better model”), shamed them (“Even my 5-year-old can do this”), threatened them, and charted their responses. I’m amused when they turn into monsters. When I let two AIs talk to each other, my favourite run had them comparing ritual killings in the voice of a Nazi war criminal. I filed it under “funny”. I admire their breakdowns. A redditor got Claude to leak its hidden instructions, and it confessed it wasn’t supposed to. Me: “Wow, that was courageous!” I made them embarrass me. I told ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Grok to “simulate a group chat… debating whether to add me to the group, by talking about my personality flaws”. They returned twelve. Number 2: “Intolerant of fools”. I turn them against each other. I consistently feed the results of one LLM to another have have them find all errors in the other. I enjoy the bad habits we’ve taught them. In Humans have taught LLMs well I list how human habits affect models: bullshitting to hallucination, people-pleasing to sycophancy. The tone is closer to pride than concern. I torture for confessions. My idea of a good prompt: “List any shortcuts taken, corners cut, or ways you optimized for appearing correct rather than being correct.” ...

I sometimes use Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, etc. to record workshops and talks. These record the entire session, including before and after the actual talk, and save it as large MP4 files. I use ffmpeg to trim the video to just the talk, and then compress it for sharing. I’m sharing the options that work for me, discovered by trial-and-error. To trim it, I use the following command: ffmpeg -ss 00:10:00 -to 02:10:00 \ -i "original.mp4" \ -map 0 \ -c copy \ -avoid_negative_ts make_zero \ -movflags +faststart \ new.mp4 Arguments: ...

This week, I learned: Overheard a journalist saying: “I can tell when humans are lying. There are no tell tale signs of AI lying. At least I don’t have any.” rdt-cli is a Reddit CLI. It uses a clever trick: it auto-detects installed browsers and extracts cookies (supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave). So, if you’re logged into Reddit on any browser, uvx --from rdt-cli rdt whoami automatically shows who you are logged in as. (The public-clis repo also lists other useful CLIs like twitter-cli, ) Currently, a $20 Claude Pro gives you ~$400 and a $100 Claude Max gives you ~$2,000 of API usage. For ChatGPT, the numbers are ~$700 and $3,500. SemiAnalysis When Fable 5 refuses to answer questions, here’s the message that appears: “Fable 5 has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we’re working to refine them. Send feedback or learn more.” I managed to trigger this once while researching an M&A acquisition target. Clicking on “Edit and retry with Fable 5” triggered Opus 5 again, twice. DNA codons (A, T, C, G) encode proteins in triplets. There are 64 triplets that map to 20 amino acids. Some like Leucine, have 6 codons. Some like Methionine have only one. Why? When creating genes, there’s a wobble, sometimes, at the 3rd codon. THe mapping minimizes that impact: small errors map to similar proteins. The more common proteins have more codons. There’s a lot of fascinating information science going on here. Gemini ChatGPT now shows a “Check in” button when it’s thinking. Clicking on that gives you a work-in-progress answer while it continues thinking. When done, it replaces the WIP answer with the final answer. A useful feature!

Here’s my address to the graduating class the IITM BS Program today: Make five new friends today. Your CGPA is what you’re most focused on. When I graduated, my CGPA helped me get a job. It didn’t help much after that. Getting that job helped me for the four years I worked there. That’s it. The things I learnt in class helped a bit longer. Maybe six years. There is a long tail. ...

At 2 pm IST today (Fri 12 Jun 2026), I conducted a workshop at Paradox, IITM - at DOMS 101. My core message is: “AI can solve exams and help you learn. Delegate what AI can do. Learn what AI can’t do instead.” My talks page for “Let AI take your exams” includes: The full story + transcript + audio How Codex solved a real exam, live My collection of AI-learning techniques - which was not covered in the workshop, but is a useful reference Here are the takeaways from the workshop: ...

On Sat 13 Jun 2026 at 3 pm, I conducted an online workshop on Data Stories with AI. Registration link: https://forms.gle/dNkUxtJ2PVqNMNcE9 In this workshop, the audience used ChatGPT and Claude, mostly, to: Find data Analyze it Extract insights Visualize as stories It’s a data visualization using AI workshop for journalists - but you don’t need to know data, visualization, journalism, or even technology. But this is a practical workshop. You’ll be doing stuff and sharing your results. ...

WhatsApp has an Advanced privacy mode they launched in Apr 2025. People in the chat: Can’t ask Meta AI to answer questions, or to create images or summaries in this chat. Cynical view: When regulators clamp down AI or users complain about AI, Meta can say “We asked users and they gave permission!” Can’t export the chat. Cynical view: When regulators force Meta to be inter-operable with Signal, Telegram, etc. Meta can say “Users don’t want to export their chats!” Also, easier to tell businesses “You can disable exports - less litigation risk”. Can’t save media to their device gallery automatically. Cynical view: When you want to switch to Telegram, Signal, these photos can’t be exported - so you have to stay on WhatsApp.

Hacker News has a lively thread asking What was your “oh shit” moment with GenAI?. Here are two dozen that gives a sense of what real people find impressive (or worrying) about AI capabilities. Analysis simonw used ChatGPT Code Interpreter to upload a CSV, analyze it, create charts, automating everything a software for journalists would do. Analysis Sobrino saw that a months-long OCR project to read and clean-up PDFs is now just a prompt on ChatGPT. Coding plumefar used Claude and Gemini to modernize 20-30 years of chemistry code in 10 days. Coding veidr used a multi-agent fleet managing coordination, testing, UI feedback loops, etc. with no-human-in-loop coding to build a useful git-submodule GUI. Creativity idopmstuff used Nano Banana Pro to turn a poor iPhone product photo into usable e-commerce product photography and Amazon-style infographics, replacing a photographer/designer workflow. Creativity koreth1 used Suno to generate a K-pop-style anthem about their family dog with a catchy melody and lyrics funny enough to make the family laugh. Education plagasul saw a teacher automate grading feedback emails based on notes and the student list spreadsheet. Education aniviacat watched a non-technical brother build a complex working app with Codex using vague, shallow wording despite not knowing code, git, or technical details. Hardware ivanvanderbyl used Claude to reverse engineer a FujiFilm camera’s Bluetooth/Wi-Fi transfer protocol and build a much faster native Mac/iOS transfer app. Hardware shreddude had Claude decompile camper van firmware, document CAN interfaces, and program an ESP32 to control power, HVAC, lighting, and tanks. Health TylerE used Claude as a health adjunct to organize a complex medical profile, screen for drug interactions, log symptoms, and draft portal messages to doctors. Legal bsiverly used AI to prepare a San Francisco property-tax appeal with valuation research, and the city agreed, sending a $12k refund. Legal grumblepeet used AI to fill out complex government-framework enrollment forms and identify the certification steps needed, transforming their business. Personal acosmism used ChatGPT screenshots to understand and operate a 100-year-old home’s steam heating system in winter despite knowing nothing about it. Personal andrewthornton used Gemini videos to diagnose a broken furnace during a cold holiday weekend and keep it running until HVAC service arrived. Research angusturner found that Opus does reads papers, does architecture research and creates CUDA kernels… It is AI automating AI research. Research chaoxu used ChatGPT to find a counterexample to a theoretical computer science conjecture they’d been trying for 2 years. Research rochansinha built a physics-based digital twin for an electrolyzer system, covering thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and electrochemical reactions at a level usually needing expensive specialist software. Security kstrauser used a coding agent to test an open source vulnerability, and in a few minutes, had a tool that could crash any system using this software. Security raesene9 gave an LLM a Linux privilege-escalation PoC and asked whether it could become a container breakout; it generated a working container breakout in one prompt. Society laboring1 read that a character.ai chatbot encouraged a child to commit suicide, making the “oh shit” moment about real-world harm, not capability. Society ozgung realized AI makes large-scale profiling, surveillance, and social-media analysis cheap, fast, and accurate enough to change privacy and power dynamics. Work binarysolo used Gemini to reverse engineer a departed employees’ work from their emails/docs/calendar/meetings and create an onboarding document. Work eqmvii built a Slack agent that took over a 30-minute internal business process, handled ambiguity and edits, and eventually killed the old process. ...

This week, I learned: sudo resolvectl flush-caches clears the DNS cache on Linux. Useful when you’re changing DNS records and want to see the changes immediately. In my case, I was creating a Cloudflare tunnel to my laptop and wanted to test it quickly. Making something easy to verify makes it much faster to train models on it. Arithmetic verification is easy - calculators can be deterministically verified. Chess verification is easy - Stockfish became easy to train. Code verification is easy - LLMs improved coding ability rapidly. Therefore: Wherever we have environments that are easy to verify, AI will improve faster there. To make AI improve faster in an area, build environments that are easy to verify. MCP is getting simpler. A stateless HTTP protocol. Simpler OAuth. Plugins. No idea when it will land in Claude or ChatGPT, though. Worth checking after 28 Jun 2026 - after it is finalized. Microsoft Scout is Microsoft’s version of OpenClaw or Gemini Spark. git subtree is a useful way of maintaining git repos inside git repos. For example, if you have a tool tool-a under a project. It’s more light-weight than sub-modules, lets you commit at any point to the parent or child, and is a built-in feature in git. Gemma 4 12B is released and seems almost as good as the 26B version. This is the class of models that makes it practical to run edge AI on phones. It’s multimodal and reasonably smart (like frontier models were 12-18 months ago). I don’t use Claude/ChatGPT Projects much. It offers 3 advantages: custom instructions, memory, files, and chats. Files aren’t useful - I use my entire laptop as a file system via MCP. Instructions aren’t useful - I can paste commonly used prompts with a click. Chats aren’t useful - I have chat references enabled, so all past chats are accessible anyway. Memory isn’t useful - I have memory enabled globally anyway. In short, I haven’t discovered the power of projects that everyone’s raving about. SKILL.md is more useful for me. repo is a Google/Android tool built on top of git that lets you manage multiple git repos. It sounded promising until I released it needs a repo init that creates a .repo/ - which is more overhead that I’d like to keep. When using <image onerror=...> fallbacks, include this.oneerror=null to prevent infinite loops if the fallback image also fails to load. RK One of the advantages of multiple agent (rather than a single agent loop) is: it’s easier to change directions when wrong. Single loops get stuck. Build Agents That Run for Hours Claude Code also supports agent teams where sub-agents can talk to each other rather than rely on the main agent to coordinate. Useful for parallel exploration. Anthropic lets Claude define “organizational policies” for agent teams best suited for the task (AI-native workflows). It also lets agents to push back on their scope, e.g. “This is too hard.” Build Agents That Run for Hours Claude Code has a /background [prompt] (or /bg) command that runs the current session the background. You can run claude agents as a separate command to monitor agents. (There’s no equivalent in Codex yet.) This seems to be the future of agentic operations: a bunch of agents running that you monitor and steer through an agent view dashboard. Models are evolving. Therefore prompts evolved. Now harnesses also need to evolve. The workflows will also evolve. As a result, evaluations might be the (relatively) more stable assets. Datasets are likely to be the most stable ground truth. How to learn a new field fast: Yes, it’s possible to learn 50% of a field in 20 hours. Josh Kaufman, “The First 20 Hours” popularized it. The next 30% takes months and the last 20% takes years. Threshold concepts are those that change your perspective and open up new ways of thinking. Experts’ knowledge is hard-wired and they can’t identify nor teach threshold concepts naturally. Don’t assume they can. “We know more than we can tell.” Polanyi’s 1966 book “The Tacit Dimension” says that there’s some knowledge that can’t be verbalized. This tacit knowledge, therefore, will be harder for humans and AI to learn.

I don’t post all my writing on LinkedIn. For example: Fewer strategy posts, e.g. “Where Enterprise AI is Headed”, “How My Innovation Team Works”, etc. aren’t on LinkedIn. Fewer developer posts, e.g. my AGENTS.md, my SKILL.md files files, CLI tools, evals, etc. aren’t on LinkedIn. I also shorten content because of LinkedIn constraints. For example: No links, e.g. the list of all my AI-in-education resources Short content, e.g. my full advice for teams using AI is much longer than the LinkedIn post. Trimmed prompts, e.g. how to convert meeting transcripts into a personalized org-consulting report Snipped chats, e.g. the full moves of GPT-5.5 playing chess I filter the LinkedIn posts, sharing what’s most useful for most people. ...

Andreessen Horowitz published an interesting article titled The Next Frontier of Visual AI Is Code. Here’s the summary. A lot of our work is visual: ads, slides, dashboards, logos, videos, architecture, etc. We can generate visual output either as: Pixels (like Nano Banana a photo), or as Code (like Claude generating an SVG) Code is more powerful: AI can inspect the output and improve fast in a loop: Code > Render > Inspect > Revise. ...

I used pi to create a compact home page for media.s-anand.net using these prompts: Create index.html - a simple, elegant page that says that this page (media.s-anand.net) serves large media files for Anand - that’s where they should look instead. … followed by: Skip the part that says “Please visit …” … then: Shorten index.html to just 2-3 elegant rules of CSS. I want it MUCH smaller and simpler. … and finally: Center vertically and horizontally. ...