fuck your AI slop: 5 rules of writing cold messages that actually get sales 🔗
I’ve been helping SF companies get sales and one of my customers came to me with a cold message that he wasn’t getting any good results with it. A com [...]
N’s Blog
Posts
To raise VC, think like a VC first 🔗
A lot of people have the wrong idea about fundraising. They make fundraising a really complex thing, making it seem that you have to change your entir [...]
Linkedin-maxxing: An early-stage GTM guide to sell your product 🔗
Did you know that LinkedIn caps you at 200 connection requests per week? There are a few finite resources in the world, but nothing seems as finite as [...]
Priceless everyday experiences in SF that are impossible in India 🔗
I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to move to San Francisco last year and build my startup. I moved all the way from New Delhi – and now when I loo [...]
I wrote 300k+ lines of code this month thanks to AI 🔗
pg recently retweeted this from when he posted this last year, which made me check out how much lines of code I ship. I’ve attached a picture below. O [...]
Meditations on How I Got Into Y Combinator 🔗
I just got accepted into Y Combinator. It feels like a dream, because their motto is something I’ve been turning over in my head since I was a kid rea [...]
AI Means the Death of Open Source 🔗
On the same day that a popular tech YouTuber Theo published a video about how “open source is the future for tech companies”, Cal.com, one of the most [...]
AI is Killing B2B SaaS 🔗
SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth.1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffe [...]
Vibe Coding Is Creating Braindead Coders 🔗
Confession: I’ve been using Claude Code to write all my code for me. And I think it’s making me worse at the thing I’ve loved doing for twelve years. [...]
Lessons from my journey to become the founder I wish I’d met earlier 🔗
I celebrate another revolution around the great big ball of fire today. This was a big year for me: I founded my first product startup, all solo. I’m [...]
There’s a Better Way to Code with AI 🔗
Every developer I know has the same frustrating ritual. Open Claude Code or Cursor and ask it to do a task. The AI gives you generic code, sometimes u [...]
Don’t Repeat Mistakes, Teach AI to Remember Every Code Review Instead 🔗
This is part of my “AI in SF” series, where I share real AI engineering workflows from San Francisco startups. I recently interviewed engineers from P [...]
Cursor AI Best Practices: Using the Gold Standard Files Workflow for Precise Results 🔗
This is a part of my “AI in SF” series, where I share real AI engineering workflows of SF startups. I recently interviewed an engineer from Pallet (th [...]
Cursor AI Workflow for Complex Projects (That Actually Works) 🔗
Social media is full of people showing off their perfect little demo apps claiming AI is revolutionary, meanwhile, AI keeps suggesting fixes for files [...]
AI Can’t Even Fix a Simple Bug — But Sure, Let’s Fire Engineers 🔗
Reddit discovered the funniest thing in tech this week, and it shows exactly how broken the AI narrative is. The newly released GitHub Copilot agent w [...]
Why Good Programmers Use Bad AI 🔗
AI code generation is error-prone. Why, then, are programmers still using it? Everyone from YC partners to Fiverr’s CEO has been proclaiming that “90% [...]
MCP Getting Started: Model Context Protocol on Windows 🔗
MCPs are a way for AIs to interact with the outside world. An MCP can allow AI to read emails, post tweets, message your friends, and much more. We ar [...]
My AI Prompt Engineering Playbook for Developers 🔗
You know by now that AI can dramatically speed up your development process (when used correctly.) But the key is knowing how to communicate with the A [...]
Infantilization at Big Tech 🔗
The first time I encountered Big Tech was at age 15 when I won Google Code In. They flew me and my family to San Francisco and showed us around the Go [...]
Vibe Coding for Beginners: Build your First App with AI 🔗
Imagine if you could build your own apps and tools just by describing what you want. That’s now possible thanks to new AI tools. This guide will show [...]
The day I taught AI to understand code like a Senior Developer 🔗
Is it just me, or are the code generation LLMs we’re all using not that good? For months, I’ve watched developers praise LLMs while silently cleaning [...]
Context, Structure, Organization: The AI Development Trifecta 🔗
AI is incredibly powerful, but it needs guidelines. “Vibe coding” might work initially, but as the project grows, it creates more mistakes than it sol [...]
Making an emoji terminal game in an hour 🔗
I recently moved to NYC since I was accepted by the Recurse Center, and today was my first day at their hub. The day started by nerding out on the ret [...]
Karpathy’s ‘Vibe Coding’ Movement Considered Harmful 🔗
Last Tuesday at 1 AM, I was debugging a critical production issue in my AI dev tool. As I dug through layers of functions, I suddenly realized — unlik [...]
Security Checklist and Prompt For Vibe Coders 🔗
Two days ago, my friend Owen messaged me in a panic. He had built an impressive SaaS app using Bolt, but realized that his OpenAI API key was complete [...]
Cursor workflows for building SaaS products in 2025 🔗
As a software engineer experimenting with AI for the past 2 years, I’ve tested nearly every AI coding assistant on the market and developed a workflow [...]
I cut my browser debugging time in half using AI & MCP 🔗
In 12 years of my dev career, I’ve spent countless hours battling browser bugs. Recently, I discovered an MCP that’s cut my debugging time in half. MC [...]
Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy 🔗
Last week, X exploded when a “vibe coder” announced his SaaS was under attack. His business, built entirely with AI assistance and “zero hand-written [...]
My Cursor AI Workflow That Actually Works in Production 🔗
Using AI for coding isn’t perfect, but it definitely makes me faster. I’ve been coding with Cursor AI since it was launched now while building my SaaS [...]
Endgame of a post-AGI world 🔗
I’m not sure if I’m ready for what’s coming next with AI. Things are moving too fast. The recent releases of Claude 3.7 and GPT-4.5 were… surprising. [...]
New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code 🔗
Something’s been bugging me about how new devs learn and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every [...]
AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers 🔗
A couple of days ago, Cursor went down during the ChatGPT outage. I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS e [...]
I built an AI Trend Analyzer to stop myself from doomscrolling 🔗
As a content creator in the tech space, I found myself caught in an all-too-familiar trap: endless hours of doomscrolling through social media and new [...]
Is AI ready to be a mid-level engineer? 🔗
Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed AI will replace mid-level engineers by 2025. As someone building AI developer tools and studying their real-world imp [...]
Giga: An AI that actually understands your codebase 🔗
If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link to the article. [...]
Giga: An AI that actually understands your codebase 🔗
If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link. Modern software development is complex. Our projects have hundreds of files, intricate depe [...]
Stop Using Just One AI Model in Production 🔗
Learning why model redundancy > optimization It started with a frustrating Thursday afternoon. Our code analysis service was hitting rate limits const [...]
LLM “Structured Outputs” are Missing the Point 🔗
Last week, my AI coding assistant generated a perfectly-structured code review suggestion. The format was immaculate - every field properly typed, eve [...]
What 6 hours at HN #1 actually does to your traffic 🔗
“Every developer has that one post they almost didn’t write…” For 2025, I decided to get back into technical writing. I’ve been obsessing over getting [...]
The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer 🔗
A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors f [...]
When perfect code isn’t enough: My journey with AI IDEs 🔗
Last month, I asked Claude to help refactor a React component. The code it wrote was beautiful - clean, well-documented, following all the best practi [...]
Hacked WordPress, Lost Rankings: My Jekyll Redemption Story 🔗
I’ve been running multiple WordPress blogs for my friends and family on my own VPS since ~2012. I didn’t bother checking them for updates, and surpris [...]
Resumable Tests Save & Load State for Jest and NodeJS 🔗
At Metric, my latest accounting AI automation startup, we’ve built complex interconnected pipelines that query an LLM with multiple transactions and i [...]
Simple “Search” with LIKE in MySQL Sequelize 🔗
A simple way to implement a “search” feature into your node app is using the database engine to check for presence of tokenized search query. In my ca [...]
Better Vue SEO with Prerender SPA Plugin and vue-cli 🔗
Vue loads content asynchronously, which means that Google’s crawlers won’t pick up your site for indexing. That is, until you give them a rendered ver [...]
Bye Ghost, hello again WordPress! 🔗
Ghost… I tried. Trust me, I really did. I stuck with you for over 3 years, developed a custom theme on you, hacked around any shortcomings you had. Bu [...]
Instant, real-time, RSS to email 🔗
I’ve been looking for a free option for instant RSS to email subscriptions, and while Zapier comes close; the free tier does not support the volume or [...]
How to do X using Sequelize 🔗
I don’t know about you guys, but I always have an annoying time trying to figure out how to make Sequelize work — the documentation seems to have a de [...]
Why is Gift Card Rebel everywhere on YouTube? 🔗
Recently I’ve been noticing a bunch of spam comments all over YouTube — with different text and links, but all leading to one single site: giftcardreb [...]
Super easy image uploads with Multer and Express 🔗
Multer makes file uploads via <form enctype="multipart/form-data"></form> really simple. If you’re looking to host user images on your filesystem and [...]