RSS Feed

Hyperlinks are like cashew nuts

Shreyas Prakash headshot

Shreyas Prakash

Take a small block of paragraph and sprinkle 8-10 hyperlinks in it—

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec tristique elit sit amet diam fringilla posuere sodales a leo. Cras auctor efficitur purus in suscipit. Sed ornare lectus at nisl dictum semper. Donec efficitur lorem in nisi dapibus condimentum. Ut ex tortor, aliquam at facilisis vitae, porttitor maximus sapien. Duis non nibh sodales, vehicula nisl vitae****, tempor nibh. Praesent nibh odio****, tempor at rhoncus in, blandit id ipsum.

Just like cashew nuts in an Indian gravy, if you add too much of it, it loses it’s uniqueness. When you’re eating, you want the crunchiness of the cashews to come sometimes, not all the time. So you add less cashew nuts. To make it look like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec tristique elit sit amet diam fringilla sodales a leo. Sed ornare lectus at nisl dictum semper. Donec Ut ex tortor, aliquam at facilisis vitae, porttitor maximus sapien. Duis non nibh, tempor nibh. Praesent nibh odio, tempor at rhoncus in, blandit id ipsum.

If you’re wondering what I have to do with cashew nuts in a curry, or hyperlinks in an essay, you would be surprised how much this lesson holds true for so many things in life.

Keep meeting a friend everyday, and they feel “drained” to meet you. But you meet them rarely, and they forget that you exist.

Keep posting reels everyday on Instagram, or put some pithy quotes on Linkedin, and you’re all of a sudden an influencer/pundit, and less of a friend that you might know and would want to follow. Don’t post anything at all, and you don’t exist.

Everything in a way, is like adding cashew nuts to a curry.

Subscribe to get future posts via email (or grab the RSS feed). 2-3 ideas every month across design and tech

2026

  1. How I started building softwares with AI agents being non technical

2025

  1. Legible and illegible tasks in organisations
  2. L2 Fat marker sketches
  3. Writing as moats for humans
  4. Beauty of second degree probes
  5. Read raw transcripts
  6. Boundary objects as the new prototypes
  7. One way door decisions
  8. Finished softwares should exist
  9. Essay Quality Ranker
  10. Export LLM conversations as snippets
  11. Flipping questions on its head
  12. Vibe writing maxims
  13. How I blog with Obsidian, Cloudflare, AstroJS, Github
  14. How I build greenfield apps with AI-assisted coding
  15. We have been scammed by the Gaussian distribution club
  16. Classify incentive problems into stag hunts, and prisoners dilemmas
  17. I was wrong about optimal stopping
  18. Thinking like a ship
  19. Hyperpersonalised N=1 learning
  20. New mediums for humans to complement superintelligence
  21. Maxims for AI assisted coding
  22. Personal Website Starter Kit
  23. Virtual bookshelves
  24. It's computational everything
  25. Public gardens, secret routes
  26. Git way of learning to code
  27. Kaomoji generator
  28. Style Transfer in AI writing
  29. Copy, Paste and Cite
  30. Understanding codebases without using code
  31. Vibe coding with Cursor
  32. Virtuoso Guide for Personal Memory Systems
  33. Writing in Future Past
  34. Publish Originally, Syndicate Elsewhere
  35. Poetic License of Design
  36. Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast
  37. Technology and regulation have a dance of ice and fire
  38. How I ship "stuff"
  39. Weekly TODO List on CLI
  40. Writing is thinking
  41. Song of Shapes, Words and Paths
  42. How do we absorb ideas better?

2024

  1. Read writers who operate
  2. Brew your ideas lazily
  3. Vibes
  4. Trees, Branches, Twigs and Leaves — Mental Models for Writing
  5. Compound Interest of Private Notes
  6. Conceptual Compression for LLMs
  7. Meta-analysis for contradictory research findings
  8. Beauty of Zettels
  9. Proof of work
  10. Gauging previous work of new joinees to the team
  11. Task management for product managers
  12. Stitching React and Rails together
  13. Exploring "smart connections" for note taking
  14. Deploying Home Cooked Apps with Rails
  15. Self Marketing
  16. Repetitive Copyprompting
  17. Questions to ask every decade
  18. Balancing work, time and focus
  19. Hyperlinks are like cashew nuts
  20. Brand treatments, Design Systems, Vibes
  21. How to spot human writing on the internet?
  22. Can a thought be an algorithm?
  23. Opportunity Harvesting
  24. How does AI affect UI?
  25. Everything is a prioritisation problem
  26. Now
  27. How I do product roasts
  28. The Modern Startup Stack
  29. In-person vision transmission
  30. How might we help children invent for social good?
  31. The meeting before the meeting
  32. Design that's so bad it's actually good
  33. Breaking the fourth wall of an interview
  34. Obsessing over personal websites
  35. Convert v0.dev React to Rails ViewComponents
  36. English is the hot new programming language
  37. Better way to think about conflicts
  38. The role of taste in building products
  39. World's most ancient public health problem
  40. Dear enterprises, we're tired of your subscriptions
  41. Products need not be user centered
  42. Pluginisation of Modern Software
  43. Let's make every work 'strategic'
  44. Making Nielsen's heuristics more digestible
  45. Startups are a fertile ground for risk taking
  46. Insights are not just a salad of facts
  47. Minimum Lovable Product

2023

  1. Methods are lifejackets not straight jackets
  2. How to arrive at on-brand colours?
  3. Minto principle for writing memos
  4. Importance of Why
  5. Quality Ideas Trump Execution
  6. How to hire a personal doctor
  7. Why I prefer indie softwares
  8. Use code only if no code fails
  9. Personal Observation Techniques
  10. Design is a confusing word
  11. A Primer to Service Design Blueprints
  12. Rapid Journey Prototyping
  13. Directory Structure Visualizer
  14. AI git commits
  15. Do's and Don'ts of User Research
  16. Design Manifesto
  17. Complex project management for product

2022

  1. How might we enable patients and caregivers to overcome preventable health conditions?
  2. Pedagogy of the Uncharted — What for, and Where to?

2020

  1. Future of Ageing with Mehdi Yacoubi
  2. Future of Equity with Ludovick Peters
  3. Future of Tacit knowledge with Celeste Volpi
  4. Future of Mental Health with Kavya Rao
  5. Future of Rural Innovation with Thabiso Blak Mashaba
  6. Future of unschooling with Che Vanni
  7. Future of work with Laetitia Vitaud
  8. How might we prevent acquired infections in hospitals?

2019

  1. The soul searching years
  2. Design education amidst social tribulations
  3. How might we assist deafblind runners to navigate?