pradeepta's Blog

It’s getting hard to keep track of the race between agent coding tools and models. Last month it was all about one tool. This month, it’s Claude. Next month, it might be Cursor again. The pace is wild...

I was thinking about how I’d describe my philosophy of life, and this is the best way I’ve found to put it: At the very highest level, I’m a skeptic with a sunny disposition. That’s the overarching ...

The next time you find yourself wanting, needing, or expecting someone to change their behavior, pause for a moment and turn that same question toward yourself. How Hard It Is to Change It is incre...

This almost feels like engineering in 2026 can be described as the rise of the mids. Mid-level engineers can suddenly afford to think longer and deeper with AI and, as a result, write really beautiful...

It’s pretty interesting that we now live in a world where hyper-personalized software is no longer a pipe dream. We’re literally able to build software with an audience of exactly one. That’s powerfu...

Using domain-specific languages DSLs as a prompting technique is a bit of a pro move — and in a production monitoring / incident management setting think “Ming on-call watching dashboards”, it can mak...

We witnessed a great battle at work today. Claude code took a ticket route to PR, and Cursor bot swooped in and dropped some pretty harsh comments about that code. The Claude code fought back, fixes ...

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, passed away today. Beyond the comic, I really liked his books. They had a big impact on how I think. One of the main things I learned from reading his work is how...

I’ve been working on a little project using iMessage Kithttps://github.com/photon-hq/imessage-kit. It’s a small library that makes it easier to work with iMessage-style interfaces and behaviors in you...

I recently read a tweet by Patrick Collison responding to a thread by Karpathy back in December. The discussion was about wishing there were a better way to read alongside LLMs large language models, ...

If you haven’t tried it yet—whether you’re diabetic or not—get a continuous glucose monitor CGM and wear it for a while. You’ll be surprised by what you find. Honestly, I can almost guarantee you’ll b...

I’ve been thinking about how referral programs work today and how limited they are in how they reward people. Most existing programs are basically just a code or link: you share it with your friends, ...

I’ve been thinking: the cost of admission for speaking to a real human being should go up. Drowning in Noise There is just so much noise out there, and it’s getting worse—especially because we now ...

I like to listen to a lot of different kinds of music. I’d like to think I have a pretty varied taste: everything from Brazilian jazz from the ’70s, to blues which I really love, to classical jazz—by ...

I have a dog. His name is Larry, and he’s one of the best things that’s happened to me in the last 6 years. Larry is a rescue dog, and I keep telling my friends and colleagues—especially the ones who...

Looks like Anthropic just pulled access from some unauthorized third-party software that was trying to circulate or resell the Anthropic plan in some way. From what I can tell, the biggest victim her...

AI has a real cost. Think about it like this: you wouldn’t give your teenage daughter a Ferrari as her first car. You’d probably start her with a Honda Civic or something similar—safe, reliable, and n...

One hidden benefit of using AI to write code is that it can actually reduce your emotional bias. When I write something myself, my brain gets emotionally invested in it. I start to develop confirmati...

For the past week or so, I’ve been using text-to-post tools to collect my thoughts, have them re-edited into a better, more adjustable format, and then cross-post them. The feedback has been valuable....

Speaking to one of my senior engineers, it hit me: a huge part of what an engineer does is thinking, planning, and researching. Of course that’s important work—but it also consumes a lot of time. Tod...

To all my city and senior leader friends out there: AI costs are real costs. And we often struggle to measure the actual ROI of AI deployment. If your team starts using top-tier models like Opus left...

Companies spend so much time just organizing their knowledge bases. That’s because what’s really valuable in a company is knowledge—and inherently, knowledge lives in people. To capture that knowledg...

Getting someone to use your product the way you prioritize is just so damn hard. It’s one thing for you, as the builder, to use the product yourself, feel good about it, and convince yourself it all ...

Let’s talk about skills. Skills are all the rage right now for agents. A skill is a specialized task you teach an agent so that, suddenly, it’s smarter than before. At its core, a skill is very simp...

We’ve been doing a lot of good work around agents lately—especially CLI agents—and things are really starting to look up. What I keep wondering is: what will this look like a few years from now? Hon...

Let’s talk about skills. Skills are all the rage right now for agents. A skill is a specialized task you teach an agent so that, suddenly, it’s smarter than before. At its core, a skill is very simp...

I was talking to a friend this evening, and we were brainstorming how to use AI agents to do a pretty complex analysis. His initial thinking followed the traditional data workflow: you gather data, lo...

I had an interesting chat with my neighbor today. He told me he’d seen my recent LinkedIn post and that he found it really useful. That honestly made my day. There’s something special about realizin...

Today I spoke to a very old friend of mine I hadn’t seen in 20 years. He lives in Chicago and works for Stryker, the medical devices company. We started with the usual topics—kids, family, life—and of...

OK, I had a great first day right after New Year’s, and I feel pumped up. I had a good talk with Mark, and it really reinforced that we have a great strategy in place. The team is on board, aligned, ...

I started the new year and, almost overnight, my feed on every social platform—especially Twitter—has been inundated with talk about agent orchestration. A week ago, these conversations basically didn...

Creating a brand new post is hard. Honestly, creating any kind of new content is hard. That’s been a struggle for me, and I suspect it’s a struggle for a lot of other people too. I want to share two ...

I wanted to talk a bit about skills as they apply to AI agents. Over the last few weeks AI moves very fast, there’s been a lot of talk about Claude code skills. Skills are essentially specialized tec...

Here’s a hard hitter from Nassim Nicholas Taleb that’s been stuck in my head: decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories, and then with the replacement of memories with older memories...

It’s been interesting to see what’s happened since I posted my article on LinkedIn about my orchestration framework. I honestly just wanted to share how I’d set things up and what I’d learned along th...

OK guys, quick personal update. We had a big family moment today: Raina officially got into her volleyball 12-2 power team, and she is very excited about it. She’s promised she’s going to show up, w...

First day back in the office in 2026, and I’m really excited about where things go from here with Exceeds. We’ve got a pretty busy quarter ahead. The main focus will be onboarding a lot more customer...

There seems to be a lot of activity around Claude code in general. In particular, there is quite a bit of interest in seeing whether Claude can be used to do more than simple, isolated tasks. Some pe...

OK, let's try to send a bigger message this time around. I am actually doing this by recording my voice as an audio clip and having it turned into text. The issue with the project right now is that I...

I recently discovered something very interesting with Julio about how MMS handles text messages. Apparently, MMS has a text message limit of 160 characters. Until you actually hit that limit, it’s bes...

Agentic CLI tools have adopted the idea of skills, but there’s still a problem that hasn’t really been solved yet, and I’m trying to take a stab at it. You can define and share skills, sure—but who is...

This is my first post after I deployed this app to production!...