Chinmay Deo

Intelligence may not follow division of labour

2026-09-28T00:00:00Z

I spent 90 minutes skimming through the deepseek-coder paper. It was released in early 2024. Deepseek (& others) had started giving signals that coding is a great "agentic" use case of foundation models. It's a fascinating paper, even for a non-technical person like me, because of how intuitive, sim

BLR8

2026-09-16T00:00:00Z

My current hypothesis for generating new ideas is to put myself in new situations. Today, I used Amazon Tours to visit Amazon's Bangalore Fulfillment Center (FC) BLR8. Took me back to ITC days and the start of my career to be in a warehouse. Quite fun! It's a huge space (~0.4M sq ft) for a normal pe

Picking myself

2026-09-15T00:00:00Z

I have spent the last few weeks trying to capture my state of mind in this blog post. Until today, the next 'thing to do' has always been assigned to me. While I rejected the obviously bad things to do, my approach was to default try stuff out and reject. I rarely questioned if the next 'thing to do

Instinct

2026-09-14T00:00:00Z

I got an invite to the viral AI assistant Instinct over the weekend. I have been playing with it for about 48 hours. I have also told everyone I know about it and liberally sent out invites. It's hard to emphasize how rare this is for consumer products. The last time I did this level of recommending

Talk less and listen more

2026-08-15T00:00:00Z

Trying to apply "The Mom Test" in every conversation I have. Realizing that it is hard, so hard. What is so hard? To NOT assign labels to the users' conjectures, opinions, or actions in the conversation. Labels are "context-window compaction." To NOT talk about your ideas. My brain tends to subconsc

xteink

2026-07-27T00:00:00Z

I am tempted to pick up an xteink device. xteink looked at a mature market (e-readers) and had a unique set of insights about that market: Miniatures: Miniature size, not miniature features. This is particularly pronounced in watches, which for a long time have been ridiculously large compared to mo

Kindle

2026-07-10T00:00:00Z

I enjoy reading on the Kindle. It's a great experience because it does only one thing and nothing else. There is a real commitment from the user when they pick up a Kindle: I am going to read. For the next 10 minutes/30 minutes/3 hours, I am a reader. People enjoy that tag, even if it's temporary, b

Thai food & beverages

2026-07-03T00:00:00Z

First, an admission: I have not written a lot over the last 1 month. I can't make many excuses, but for what it's worth, we took Samay on his first international trip to Thailand in mid-June (excellent!). I have had an aversion to Thai food because I had never had Thai food in Thailand. Also, I am a

Thoughts on the book "Project Hail Mary"

2026-05-29T00:00:00Z

Book spoilers ahead I have been sick nearly all of the last week, so all personal projects are on the back burner. Since I was confined to the house and we will not be entering a movie theatre for at least some time, I picked up a book. Actually, two. I finished "Strange Houses" by Uketsu and then d

Don't consume your day with current events

2026-05-27T00:00:00Z

Let's take an event: "THE LATEST CRISIS." You read, watch, or listen to the take, the counter-take, the social media take, the influencer take, the Reddit community take, your friends' take, and your parents' take. Before you know it, without your knowledge, recognition, or considered consent, you h

Prepare for my analysis of the most awaited IPOs of our generation - SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic!

2026-05-22T00:00:00Z

Word on the street is that these are dropping soon. I plan to read the S-1s and form my own conclusions with help from AI. I will share them here.

To learn something well, start small and follow historical evolution

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

I have been heads-down for the past ~3 weeks understanding agents. I played around with them, listened to podcasts, and explored GitHub repos. H/T to smol-agents (Hugging Face) and pi (Mario Zechner). I am on board with their philosophy of building minimal coding agents and letting the models do the

Selling the dream is the most significant driver of market cap

2026-04-10T00:00:00Z

We live in a capitalist world. Consumers, corporations, and the state (i.e., government via laws and regulation) are the most important groups in this world. Consumers have value because they generate demand for various goods and services. Corporations have value because they fulfill these demands.

How models approach document processing

2026-03-30T00:00:00Z

I decided last week to shift from (using AI to build vanilla software) --> (using AI to build software with AI features). This is a not-so-subtle shift in my view because I believe that unless a product has real AI-enabled features, (a) it is liable to be subsumed by general-purpose consumer applica

Happy birthday to me!

2026-03-27T00:00:00Z

Today is my 36th birthday. Happy birthday to me! Physically, I am (near) the best shape of my life, though there is a long way to go. Mentally, I feel like I have just turned 30, so a long way to go there too. Samay is here too, to celebrate, which I love. Every morning he wakes up and gives me a wi

Strategy formulation should be partly democratic

2026-03-21T00:00:00Z

I recently interacted with a few senior folks (think top 10% of the org). Our company had announced a transformative decision—one that will change the trajectory of the company—a couple of months ago. (Execution will tell whether the trajectory change is minimal or meaningful.) What struck me was: H

Why I won't use AI to write first drafts

2026-03-21T00:00:00Z

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that AI can write better than you (the average person). AI can express ideas in a simpler, clearer, and more compelling fashion...or any fashion you want, really. The question is: Should you let it? It is useful to start by thinking about ghostwrite

First trip with Samay!

2026-03-17T00:00:00Z

We are currently in the middle of our first trip with Samay, visiting Bombay and Delhi for a few days each. In addition to meeting family and friends, this trip is a great "dry run" for future, longer trips with a newborn. Our parents love spending time with all three of us. Yes, they have expressed

What does the future software PDE org look like?

2026-03-12T00:00:00Z

I was listening to a wonderful interview with Bret Taylor by John Collison. It got my brain gears spinning on this particular question: What does a software PDE org look like in the next 12–18 months? I think making predictions beyond this year is moot. Specifically in PDE because the rate of change

Moats - stronger/weaker

2026-03-06T00:00:00Z

Now that everyone can vibe code (or "agentic code," if you want to be posh) a company of their choice.... Stronger or at least similar as pre-AI Network effects: Where users beget users, or where supply <> demand reinforce each other (e.g., social networks). Data: You can copy the app, algo, UI, mar