Now

April 2026

This year, I wanted to challenge myself by picking up three difficult-to-read, but rewarding books. These are: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, In search of lost time by Marcel Proust, and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. In a manifestation exercise I did more recently, I was screaming with joy at the “idea” of finishing these three books, and I’m pretty sure it would mean something in the level of intellectual effort it would require.

So when I hopped around Waterstones books store recently, and when I found a paperback of the Infinite Jest, I really wanted to reward myself, so I took the plunge.

I’m only 30 pages into it, and this book is far far, more complicated than I imagine. Even Wallace himself, and all the literary critics who have opined on the prologue have called it a painful (but enjoyable crawl). There is still 1000 pages left, and bringing this book to the London subway grabs eyeballs with a slight highbrow disdain, almost as if they think I’m conducting some cringe-pop version of performative reading with this in the subway.

I also want to take a quick segue into agentic coding which I’ve written at lengths in the recent past, I have also found that the topic of Agentic coding has stopped feeling speculative. The broad thesis held to be true: this really has become the period when agents entered ordinary work.

For me, that shift was personal too. I moved from casually testing prototypes to using Claude Code, Codex, and related tools as part of how I actually build, think, and work. What used to feel like AI for demos now feels more like a new literacy.

That change spilled into both my side projects and my day job. I spent much of the past year building and shipping a small cluster of N=1 apps, mainly for exploring what the bleeding edge of tech looked like: I built Signify, a writing platform built around proof-of-human authorship; Dicto, a voice dictation tool with diarization and custom dictionary support; Papercup, for placing international phone calls from the browser; an Obsidian plugin to help me identify the roughest essay draft worth improving next; and a rebuilt personal website that feels far more like my own taste.

Doing this repeatedly gave me much sharper opinions on how to steer AI-assisted software instead of merely admiring it. At work too, AI stopped being an abstract trend report and became part of the texture of product conversations, workflows, and future-facing decisions. The bottleneck feels less like technical syntax now, and more like taste, judgment, and knowing what is actually worth building. For instance, now I know how best to whisper to the LLMs, to make them do things the right way.

Outside of that, London feels less like a temporary backdrop and more like a real home now, complete with routines, furniture, errands, visitors, and its own emotional weather. Praphulla and I also celebrated Vishu at our home. I did feel a bit guilt-tripped as I couldn’t contribute in the preparation of some of the dishes that were made, but she made it quite well. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Writing has also come back to the center of things as well. I still think writing is thinking, but now I also have better tools to search my note archive, recover old threads, and turn them into essays with less friction. So the mood these days is to build more, publish more, and stop hesitating at the edge of the work I already know I want to do.

Jan 2025

2025 is the year of AI. I’m aligning my professional goals to get ahead on this S-curve.

My thesis for product management is that it would become more of prototype management. There would be a lot more experimentation, quick validations that the product roles would handle, much more than what we do today. Product management and Product building would probaby fuse into this new (undefined) role. We can call this as “AI Product Management” for now, but I suspect that this would be something else entirely different.

In this earlier essay, I’d written about all the various tools I’m currently experimenting with. (Read — Idea in the shower, testing before breakfast)

I’ve also observed myself follow this (very strange) law of inverse prioritisation — What I know to be the most important, I do the least of it.

The perils of breaking these goals are so much seeped into my subconscious that I’d rather just avoid it. I think it might have a lot to do with how vulnerable I feel when I break something which I consider to be “my most important goal”. So in order to break free from this pattern, I’m announcing my learning goals in a ‘semi-public’ fashion here on this site. This is how my current 2025 learning list looks like—

1. Founder / Hacker: Great foundations on how to build SaaS apps using Ruby on Rails. Covers all the major use cases which one frequently encounters while building a modern software such as authentications, database modelling, applying business logic, frontend designing, wireframing, security, infra etc.
2. Cursor / Claude : To become better at the very bleeding edge of technology with regards to the use of AI-native tools for local development, I plan to allocate a 50$ budget every month to use both Cursor/Claude in as many use cases as I can. I’m discovering new use cases every day, and I continue to do so.

over a 36-hour livestream, I built a neutron-producing nuclear fusor in my kitchen using Claude.

successfully achieving nuclear fusion, entirely assisted by AI.

this was my first hardware project!—full story below pic.twitter.com/yuvjE5IHFb

— HudZah ⁂ (@hud_zah) January 17, 2025

If you could build a neutron-produced nuclear fusor in your kitchen with Claude in a 36-hour livestream, then I seriously believe anything is possible

Oct 2024

I’ll miss you dad. I’m not able to get over this shock. Even today, I tried calling you on your phone, even though I knew deep down that you wouldn’t pick it up. I’ll miss the fact that I will not be able to call you again and share my heart out.

Losing you has been the single most point of concentrated pain that I could recall. Perhaps this pain is a vestige from the love I’ve received from you.

I’m supposed to ‘man up’, cope with this pain and grief and not cry as much. After a few days of barricading my emotions, and to act strong in front of others, I let myself cry my heart out. Crying has been my emotional release valve and I’ve had enough of this pretense of ‘manning up’. I’m annoyed by the fact that you are now not around.

As I see myself circling around the five stages of grief, I’ve started to accept the situation (slowly). You’ll continue to live with us in our memories, dad. They are as ‘real’ as it can be, and you’re very much alive this way. Like you always used to say, I’ll continue to see ‘education as an investment’.

I’ll continue to make you proud, dad. We’re still one, just you and me, one mind, one soul, one being.

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July, 2024

On July 19th, everything, everywhere, went haywire, all at once.

Two weeks prior to this day, the student protests in Bangladesh had just started. The controversial quota system for government jobs reserved 30% positions for descendants of those who fought in the 1971 Liberation war, 10% for women, and 10% for residents of specific districts. These sparked a huge round of debates around meritocracy in the country, and it was at this junction that I landed in Dhaka.

I had come here as a part of my work at Noora Health. We were gearing ourselves towards a launch of a national health program centered around patients with hypertension, stroke and diabetes.

After arriving in Dhaka, I was situated close to our office at Bonani, and wasn’t really moving around much. In my first week, I didn’t really feel the effect of the protests happening around me in my vicinity. It was only in the second week that I started ‘feeling’ the reverberations of these student protests in and around Bonani. I wanted to order food from Foodpanda, but the restaurants were all closed. Even private caterers were not serving food then. When I tried having a meal at a neighbouring restaurant to the hotel, my card stopped working. I thought it was some glitch with the payment processor. Realised later that a nationwide shutdown had just started. There was no internet.

I was advised to stay indoors for the time being. I still had my flight back to India, and was thinking of a way in which I could reach the airport. The roads were all blocked, especially the ones to the airport.

For my flight at 9 PM that night, I got a cab to drop me at 4 AM in the morning. As the protests usually started earlier in the morning, I had to leave earlier than the earlier morning to avoid any road blockades and reach the airport safely.

Once I reached the airport, I just raw-dogged the whole day. It was then that I observed a lot of flights getting cancelled left and right. One by one. I was counting sticks every time a flight was terminated, and my total count for that day in the airport was around 10. I still had my Air India flight later that night, and I was still optimistic about the flight not being delayed (After all, it was the same Air India flight that had rescued Indians from Ukraine during the recent crisis)

Why were the flights getting cancelled though? My first instinct would have been to ‘Google’ why this was so. But I didn’t have internet. Not having internet was a relatively new phenomenon that I was experiencing.

And as you might have expected, my flight had also got cancelled that day.

In hindsight, this was the same day when the entire world witnessed one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years due to the Crowdstrike error. Corporations worldwide reported outages and disruptions, with Windows computers displaying the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. The outage had impacted sectors such as banking, trading, media companies as well as hundreds of airliners (which included my cancelled Air India flight)

While all this was happening around me, the airliners responded with— ‘All flights are getting cancelled, (perhaps), the only way to make it to India is to travel by road and cross the Bangladesh-India border…’.

![[Attachments/images/2024/10/IMG_4374.jpg]]

I got a second opinion from my work colleagues on what I could do next. Apparently, the violence and protests had also reached the airport vicinity and it was not advised to step out of the airport. So, I just sat down and waited. Thinking of what I could do next.

After a period of confusion and chaos, and in my second day at the Dhaka airport, I secured an alternate flight to Chennai, and landed home the day after that.

I somehow reached home safely, and I sincerely pray for the safety of my friends and colleagues in Bangladesh during this period of emergency. Hope normalcy is restored soon.

UPDATE (5th August)—Ms Hasina resigns as prime minister after weeks of student-led protests - which left hundreds dead - escalated and culminated in calls for her to stand down.

UPDATE (8th August)—Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been sworn in as Bangladesh’s interim leader, vowing to “uphold, support and protect the constitution”.

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