iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 23/04/2026

went to lobste.rs after a while. I think they are still not fans of AI.

72 upvotes. Title: AI as a Fascist Artifact | 47 comments

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 02/04/2026

analogies are like wet balloons, they are not very effective at explaining things

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 14/02/2026

My colleague analysed the system prompts for codex and claude and realised the reason they feel different is because of deliberate product decisions in the prompt! blog.nilenso.com/blog/2026/02...

blog.nilenso.com

Codex CLI vs Claude Code on autonomy

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 12/02/2026

I was hoping the OpenResponses API would be a meaningful step forward deal with the LLM API standardisation headaches, but right now the spec is really undercooked. There are lots of inconsistencies/contradictions between the reference schemas and what the specification says! www.openresponses.org

openresponses.org

Open Responses

Open Responses documentation overview.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 11/02/2026

Is A2A protocol completely useless? I don't know of anyone building enterprise multi-agent communication. Why design such a thick protocol for a use case that does not yet exist in practice? a2a-protocol.org/latest/ Feels like another SOAP/CORBA etc

a2a-protocol.org

A2A Protocol

The official documentation for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol. The A2A protocol is an open standard that allows different AI agents to securely communicate, collaborate, and solve complex problems tog...

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 29/09/2025

I wrote a post looking into multiple SWE/coding benchmarks. Many of them measure something narrower than what their names suggests. blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09...

SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench Pro
What it measures

How well a coding agent can submit a patch for a real-world GitHub issue that passes the unit tests for that issue.
The specifics

There are many variants: Full, Verified, Lite, Bash-only, Multimodal. Most labs in their chart report on SWE-bench Verified, which is a cleaned and human-reviewed subset.

Notes and quirks of SWE-bench Verified:

It has 500 problems, all in Python. Over 40% are issues from the Django source repository; the rest are libraries. Web applications are entirely missing. The repositories that the agents have to operate are real, hefty open source projects.
Solutions to these issues are small—think surgical edits or small function additions. The mean lines of code per solution are 11, and median lines of code are 4. Amazon found that over 77.6% of the solutions touch only one function.
All the issues are from 2023 and earlier. This data was almost certainly in the training sets. Thus it’s hard to tell how much of the improvements are due to memorisation.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 19/09/2025

Wrote about units of work being a useful lever for getting good results from AI-assisted coding. blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09...

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 12/09/2025

I've been poking Srihari, our most experienced engineer @nilenso.com to share his hard-earned knowledge for the benefit of others. Even if you're not an engineering leader like me, this checklist gives a lot of insight into what makes a great engineering org. blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/09...

My Quarterly System Health Check-in

It is essential to periodically take a few steps back from the day to day and reflect on where we are against our strategic goals. If you’re an engineering leader, a head of engineering, a director, or a VP, you likely have a recurring meeting to this effect.

In this post, I propose a structure for this operational exercise (complementing a business review) that lasts 2-4 hours, every month or quarter. I see quality as solving for the Pareto front with the tangible dimensions of reliability, performance, cost, delivery and security, and the more intangible dimensions of simplicity and social structures. For each dimension, go through the list of questions below and try to answer them together.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 15/08/2025

grateful for my low-quality education where teachers could not correctly explain the basics of anything right it pushed me to cultivate good epistemics and build truth-seeking habits early on it also forced me to never trust authoritative figures, many are very incompetent

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 14/08/2025

Why Does AI Feel So Different? An enjoyable read from my colleague, Srihari. We've been talking about why this disruption feels different from other recent technological disruptions and he captured a lot of that really well in this post. Link: blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/08...

Image description
While Kuhn doesn’t go into it, the technological diffusion, and the economic impact of scientific revolutions are better studied through the GPT (general purpose technology) paper from Bresnahan & Trajtenberg in 1995.

> “General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) are technologies that can affect an entire economy (usually at a national or global level). They have the potential for pervasive use in a wide range of sectors and, as they improve, they contribute to overall productivity growth.”

And Calvino et al in June 2025, finds that AI meets the key criteria of a General Purpose Technology. It’s pervasive, rapidly improving, enables new products, services and research methodologies, and enhances other sectors’ R&D and productivity.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 28/07/2025

Question for the "launch many parallel claude agents to go faster" crowd: Why isn't that the same problem as the Brooks's law all over again?

wikipedia screenshot of brooks's law page.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 25/07/2025

despite all the AI hype there's only been two kinds of tools with direct improvements to my life: - chat (like chatgpt, claude ai) - terminal coding agents (like claude code) surprising how nothing better has stuck yet

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 04/07/2025

Several people ask me about how I'm keeping up with all the AI things and finding signal in this noisy landscape. I wrote a guide explaining this. blog.nilenso.com/blog/2025/06...

Table of Contents

General guidelines
Starting Points
Official announcements, blogs and papers from those building AI
High signal people to follow
News and Media
Esoterica
Do I chug water from a firehose?

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 19/06/2025

I was seeing @karpathy.bsky.social's Software 3.0 talk, as one should. Surreal to see him recommend my writing to make a point on AI-assisted coding "Is that me on TV??" moment

Andrej Karpathy on the YCombinator startup school stage talking about my AI-assisted coding blog post

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 19/01/2025

is "cracked" the new codeninja/rockstar?

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 18/01/2025

Buddhist Teacher Geshe Langri Tangpa (circa 1100 AD) 🤝 XXXTentacion (2018)

In brief, directly or indirectly,
I will offer help and happiness to all my mothers,
And secretly take upon myself
All their hurt and suffering.

We ain't playin' with y'all niggas, man, you heard?
Sometimes you just gotta catch chlamydia on these niggas, G shit
You know what I'm saying? Gonorrhea, all of that shit
All of that shit
I catch all diseases in the world
So the world don't have no more diseases, you feel me?
G-shit
Yeah, yeah (P.Soul on the track)

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Reposted by atharva

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 26/12/2024

General consensus in the replies and quotes of this seems to be that the entire concept of "AI skills" is a joke - how hard is typing text into a chatbot, really? I will continue to argue that it's genuinely difficult, and that the challenge in using these tools is widely underestimated

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 04/01/2025

the reason i write and encourage other people to write is because writing is the most scalable form of persuasion and negotiation it's one of the best coordination mechanisms that humans have

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 04/01/2025

my current pet conspiracy theory is that a lot of your favourite artists are heavily using AI generated sequences in their music, but no one has noticed it yet

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 04/01/2025

TIL about the Modi (मोडी / 𑘦𑘻𑘚𑘲‎) script, used for Marathi up until the 1940s. In 2025, it looks like AI generated Devanagari.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 02/01/2025

The most meaningful work I've ever done has been with the wonderful tech team who work on the simple.org app. I wrote on the Simple blog about how ideas from systems dynamics can be used to make sense of hard problems like preventing deaths from heart disease. www.simple.org/blog/a-syste...

simple.org

A ‘systems thinking’ approach to saving lives from heart attacks and strokes

A technologists’ skill set of crafting scalable solutions works well on notoriously hard problems like public health. The way to make it approachable is to adopt ‘systems thinking’.

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 29/12/2024

i quickly concocted a writer's block unblocker (with @tldraw.com computer) it takes an oblique strategy (from the brian eno et al card deck) and uses it to provide unhinged critique of the essay you are working on to help you break out of a rut link to program: computer.tldraw.com/t/4KoB33nFEr...

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 28/12/2024

i picked up india after gandhi by ramachandra guha recently and it is a 10/10 book so far it has renewed my fascination with india context is that which is scarce. this book will catch you all up with some context

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 28/12/2024

i figured out how to use twttr without frying my brain buff.ly/3DIRL7W

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 28/12/2024

wrote a short note on why i approach everything with optimism tldr; - optimism is the ultimate form of ownership - cynicism is the rejection of ownership - hard to be curious when you're always cynical

buff.ly

I discovered that I'm radically optimistic.

I'm still struggling to convey what that means. Or if that's even the right phrase for it. it may just be these every cloud has a silver...

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 28/12/2024

'tapestry' is another linguistic casualty of LLMs

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 14/12/2024

"god is in the details" unexpectedly resonant phrase from conan o'brien and a common thread tying most things i look up to

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 09/12/2024

thindi places get a bad rep sometimes for being "dirty". many aren't, they just don't match your aesthetics of cleanliness i'd still rate those kitchens as multiple levels cleaner than the avg bangalore tech person bachelor pad kitchen

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 01/12/2024

I *occasionally* see complaints here about far-right trolls and toxicity on the twttr, and I complaints on the twttr about far-left virtue signal moralistic trolls on here. I experience neither on either—I'm either weirdly good at curating my feed or not famous enough?

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 30/11/2024

art in a white wall big box chamber is gazed upon for long, an object of loving attention art outside the door of hae kum gang korean restaurant gents toilet is ignored among the din of swinging doors and flushing toilets

dreamy surreal distortion of a bicycle framed outside hae kum gang korean restaurant gents toilet

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 27/11/2024

chai darkening ideas - add fine mud - spray spray tan - mix in water from a lake in peenya - chocolate - blend with chyawanprash

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 27/11/2024

bluesky has no gifs bluesky has no support for 1834 x 1048 video ew

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atharva @atharvaraykar.com · 22/11/2024

in case you missed it, the current thing I'm doing with my life is making esoteric thindi hopping videos youtu.be/nZfKcNHs0SI?... #bangalore ?? #dosa ?? #idly ????

youtu.be

slv indranna hotel: soft idly and dosE

YouTube video by Atharva Raykar

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