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 doing something really hard but I realize I’ve never written down my guiding principles about why I do this. This article is mostly a reminder for me: on what it takes to achieve greatness. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:| N’s Blog
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 useful (but usually not). You correct it. It apologizes. You explain again, with additional context. Rinse, repeat, until you want to throw your laptop out the window. David Cramer from Sentry recently shared his AI workflow where he maintains manual rules files to give LLMs context. Solid approach, but it feels like too much copy-pasting. It’s...| N’s Blog
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 that consistently delivers results. Here’s my tried-and-tested method for solo developers looking to leverage AI to make SaaS products.| N’s Blog
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. MCP as a term is being overused too much, but just understand them as APIs that AI agents can use. I found an MCP to let AI see and interact with your browser, called BrowserTools. Once you integrate it with Cursor, you can ask it see what’s going on in your browser and the console.| N’s Blog
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. I read articles where AI researchers admitted these systems solved problems faster than they could. We’re racing toward a world where humans might not be the smartest ones anymore. And we’re doing it willingly, even eagerly. A year ago, I laughed off AGI fears. Then, I watched these new models solve in seconds what took me hours. I s...| N’s Blog
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 news aggregators, trying to stay on top of the latest trends. The signal-to-noise ratio was abysmal—for every meaningful tech development, I had to wade through countless memes, heated arguments, and clickbait. I knew there had to be a better way.| N’s Blog
Learning why model redundancy > optimization It started with a frustrating Thursday afternoon. Our code analysis service was hitting rate limits constantly, and I was doing what any reasonable engineer would do: optimizing our token usage, implementing better queuing, and trying to squeeze maximum performance from our chosen model. Nothing worked. Or rather, everything worked a little bit, but not enough.| N’s Blog
Last week, my AI coding assistant generated a perfectly-structured code review suggestion. The format was immaculate - every field properly typed, every attribute carefully specified, the suggestion clear and actionable. There was just one problem: it fundamentally misunderstood how our authentication system worked.| N’s Blog
“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 AI to actually understand production code. Not just generate it, but really grok what’s happening in a mature codebase. After countless nights exploring this rabbit hole, I wrote about a breakthrough I had. Sunday morning, I posted it on HackerNews. “Why not,” I thought, “maybe someone will find it interesting.” Then I went ...| N’s Blog
Last month, I asked Claude to help refactor a React component. The code it wrote was beautiful - clean, well-documented, following all the best practices. It also quietly broke our error tracking system, removed a crucial race condition check (that admittedly looked like a bug), and duplicated three utility functions with slightly different implementations. Sound familiar? The AI coding space is exploding right now. Cursor hit $50M ARR, Lovable.ai reached $4M in 4 weeks, and every day there...| N’s Blog
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 surprise surprise they all got hacked. This is my journey of how I fixed it and how the latest version of my blog was born. Hmm, this is not what WordPress is supposed to look like is it?| N’s Blog
At Metric, my latest accounting AI automation startup, we’ve built complex interconnected pipelines that query an LLM with multiple transactions and invoices.| N’s Blog
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 case, I’m using MySQL with the Sequelize ORM and needed to add a e-commerce like search form with product results for a client.| N’s Blog
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 version to see. We’re going to discuss a common way to serve content properly for crawlers here, called “Prerendering”.| N’s Blog
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. But yesterday, I had to give up. Trying to upgrade from 0.11.x to 1.x had to be one of the most annoying experiences I’ve had recently and enough is enough. It’s not me, it’s you.| N’s Blog
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 speed that I require.| N’s Blog
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 dearth of examples. Here’s a few examples for “common” functionality.| N’s Blog
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: giftcardrebel.co. Why, how, or for what purpose — I have no idea.| N’s Blog
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 are wondering about the best practices involved, here’s what works for me.| N’s Blog
I recently presented you with a frequency distribution of CBSE board marks for DPS Vasant Kunj, and now I’m back with an analysis of 4052 CBSE schools across India, with results of over 476898 students.| N’s Blog
While working on a simple online yearbook for my high school class of ‘16 in Meteor, I ran into the issue of uploading images to Meteor. Turns out, it’s not uncomplicated at all.| N’s Blog
In my recent simulation of an AC generator, I show the same device from two different views: A top view and a front view. To accomplish that, I used a clever technique called 3D Projection. Here, I’m going to talk about how I did that in JavaScript and rendered it on canvas.| N’s Blog
Node MySQL is a great traditional alternative to mongo and all the jazz youngins are using. One important advice – never use + to concatenate queries unless you know what you’re doing.| N’s Blog
One of the coolest features of Jade is the concept of locals: An object that can be passed to the compiler and used in the Jade code, allowing better separation of content and templates. Ideally, these locals are held in an external file.| N’s Blog
Ghost is awesome, it really is! I’ve just started using and developing on it, but I love it already. It’s simple, smooth, and fast. You can feel the speed when you compare it to traditional CMS’ like WordPress or static generators like Jekyll – I find it to triumph both.| N’s Blog
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. The internet seems split between “AI coding is a miracle” and “AI coding is garbage.” Honestly, it’s somewhere in between. Some days Cursor helps me complete tasks in record times. Other days I waste hours fighting its suggestions. After learning from my mistakes, I wanted to share some cursor workflows and best practices that ac...| N’s Blog
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 Parabola (they’re hiring btw, more on that at the end). Here’s a technique to teach AI to learn from your mistakes. You know that feeling...| N’s Blog
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 (they’re hiring - more on that at the end). Here’s an insight that will make your AI-generated code better. Most developers use Cursor...| N’s Blog
Social media is full of people showing off their perfect little demo apps claiming AI is revolutionary, meanwhile, AI keeps suggesting fixes for files that don’t exist or rewrites working code into broken messes. Does that sound familiar? Here’s the thing — the “vibe coders” are not wrong about AI...| N’s Blog
A mindset shift that changed the way I think about the world In India, knowledge is currency. Three months ago, if another founder asked me about my marketing strategy, I’d give them some generic answer and change the subject. You don’t share knowledge until there’s something in it for you. I recently moved to San Francisco. A CTO of a unicorn startup had read one of my blog articles and we started talking over DMs. When I got to SF, I asked him to meet, and he agreed. We met in FiDi fo...| N’s Blog
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 was given permission to make pull requests on Microsoft’s .NET runtime, and the results couldn’t be funnier. The AI confidently submitted broken code, while human developers patiently explained why it didn’t work. Over and over again, for days.| N’s Blog
Every day I see another heartfelt post about “resisting AI use” or “keeping the craft pure.” Those posts remind me of myself. If you met me two years ago, you’d see me tastefully craft each line and function of the code I write. Fast forward to today, and I’ve let go of control and I let the AI handle a lot of my codebase. Not because I necessarily want to, but because I feel like we programmers don’t have a choice anymore? The uncomfortable truth is that AI is changing our work...| N’s Blog
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 are used to interacting with the digital world via apps and windows—but MCPs enable an AI to do everything that humans...| N’s Blog
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 AI properly. Here’s my collection of prompts that actually work in real-world scenarios.| N’s Blog
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 Googleplex. I arrived with wide eyes, eager to see where the “smartest people in the world” worked. But, what I found… disturbed me. Everyone wore the same badges, slept in nap pods, played the same games, and ate at the same cafeterias. I couldn’t escape the realization that I was looking at a daycare for adults. That day, I silently prom...| N’s Blog
If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link. Modern software development is complex. Our projects have hundreds of files, intricate dependencies, and carefully thought-out architectural decisions.| N’s Blog
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 flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer. Here’s what I mean.| N’s Blog
Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed AI will replace mid-level engineers by 2025. As someone building AI developer tools and studying their real-world implementation, I believe this fundamentally misunderstands both the current state of AI and the role of mid-level engineers. Here’s what Meta is missing.| N’s Blog
Is it just me, or are the code generation AIs we’re all using fundamentally broken? For months, I’ve watched developers praise AI coding tools while silently cleaning up their messes, afraid to admit how much babysitting they actually need. I realized that AI IDEs don’t actually understand codebases — they’re...| N’s Blog
Last week, I moved to New York and joined the Recurse Center. This is after being in San Francisco for a month, staying next to the Embarcadero and attending On Deck Founders. I’m living in Downtown Brooklyn now, fortunate to find a place that’s just a five minute walk away from the Recurse Center. It’s been a pleasure to stay in both the cities. Some differences:| N’s Blog
AI is incredibly powerful, but it needs guidelines. “Vibe coding” might work initially, but as the project grows, it creates more mistakes than it solves. After fixing countless AI implementations, I’ve distilled it down to three core principles that actually work. The current wave of AI tools promises to 10x your development speed. What they don’t mention is how they can also 10x your debugging time if implemented poorly. I’m building tools to solve exactly this problem, and I’m ...| N’s Blog
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 retro computers, hardware labs, and 3d printers they have; followed by the first breakfast bagel of my life. I feel incredibly fortunate to be surrounded out by so many talented programmers and am looking forward to the next three months with my new friends!| N’s Blog
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 completely exposed. He was fortunate to have caught it early, but what if this had actually went into production? Owen isn’t alone. Unfortunately, AI coding assistants often generate functional but insecure code unless explicitly prompted about security concerns. After walking Owen through securing his application, I realized these lessons could help ...| N’s Blog
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 — unlike the new generation of developers, I was grateful that I could actually understand my codebase. That’s when I started thinking more about Karpathy’s recent statements on vibe coding. For those who missed it, Andrej Karpathy recently shared his thoughts on what he calls “vibe coding” — essentially surrendering code comprehension to A...| N’s Blog
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 code,” was experiencing bypassed subscriptions, maxed-out API keys, and database corruption. His follow-up admission made this notable: “as you know, I’m not technical so this is taking me longer than usual to figure out.” As someone deeply immersed in the AI code generation space, I’ve been watching this unfold with a mix of sym...| N’s Blog
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 junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. Th...| N’s Blog
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 error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s help. After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.| N’s Blog
