tldr; your boi is on is his first abroad trip(TO SFFFFF) im at the dubai airport. i open my laptop while waiting for the boarding to start. i have some time. i think about how far we have come. how easy and difficult it has been. how privileged i’ve become. become? didn’t i have these privileges all the time? well i’d say no. here is my story. hi, i’m harsh. i come from a middle class family(not victoria beckham’s type) and as a kid, i didn’t even dream about going abroad ever. i was a pretty smart kid who used to love playing sports. i was always motivated by parents to work harder, do better. they taught me that nothing in life comes easy(well, except hardships). i remember being in class 12th and deciding not to go to my high school farewell because spending 5k on a couple of hours didn’t make sense to me and it felt unfair that my parents worked so hard to earn it and it would just be gone in a couple of hours. my parents tried to convinced me to go but i had already made up my mind. i remember thinking to myself that day: what if 5k wasn’t that big a deal someday? what if life wasn’t just about money. how would my life look like then? i’m not gonna sit here on my economy seat in emirates and tell you, nah i have all the money in the world now but we are doing okay smol harsh and yeah 5k isn’t that big a deal now. i got into bits goa after my 12th which is like um what’s the school people in us go to if they don’t get into ivy league schools. yeah that one. it was my first time living alone, a lot of freedom and loneliness. i even decided to leave the college in the middle of the first sem and go back home and join a uni back there. glad to say, we didn’t go through with that decision. made a lot of mistakes. made some homies. made memories for lifetime. on a sidenote, if you can afford it, just go to college man. i see all these high school dropout kids building companies which is insane, i love that for you. but is that all there is to life? whatcha gonna do with all that money if you are 50 and not content with what you ended up sacrificing for the mills in the bank? what if you have all the money in the world but nobody to spend it with? i’d say you are smarter than that. back in 2nd year of college, me and my homie we used to grind data structures and algorithms together. i changed my phone but i wish i could show you the screenshots(pls help @saaarrth ) and show you how desperate and helpless it felt not getting shortlisted by all of those big shot companies. you start blaming stuff. you start blaming people. you start blaming everyone and everything because it feels so unfair. shocker. i know. idk who put this idea in everyone’s head that life is fair. it isn’t. you are born with a certain level of IQ, EQ, privilege, looks and all of that changes how the world perceives you. but just so you know the most good looking guy who models for idk what’s the equivalent of victoria’s secret for men(nike lol) but yeah whoever that guy is and makes a shit ton of money, i’m sure he is as miserable and as happy as you are in your life. nobody has it all. you don’t want to swap lives w anyone. because if you were willing to swap your life in entirety(sacrifices, problems, regrets, pain) with anyone else in this world genuinely then you would have become a closer version of that person already and wouldn’t feel the need to swap anyway. so yeah i finally got an internship in a company that rhymes w pisco. but i had already learnt the hustle. the art of working hard and reaching out. i wanted more(never enough by andrew wilkinson btw banger book). and so i used to do these random internships: marketing(1k rupees a month), content writing(250 per article), sales( 5k per month) and a bunch of other fullstack internships. i don’t think any of those internships have been in vain and will ever do. if nothing, it has instilled in me the belief that i can do anything and everything just by spending some time in it. with super smart models, that belief is a superpower. nothing you put your heart and mind to ever goes in vain btw. it always comes back. always. 100% 3rd year ended. our summer internship started. i was in a big firm(a company which has a video platform and rhymes with pisco) and honestly, didn’t learn anything at all there for the 2 months. just got paid a lot for a 20 year old and came back to college. by then we had BCG coming over to our college for the first time for consulting roles. i wanted to try it out. i spent days(genuinely days) polishing and making my resume better, getting reviewed by everyone and anyone. i remember the day my resume got shortlisted for interviews. we were walking in the lanes of our hostel. i was so excited. i didn’t know what’s gonna come or what’s gonna happen but i knew that it would be fun and fun it was. i spent the next 25 days reaching out to all the bitsians in the world who are working in bcg trying to setup mock interviews, working my ass off in case studies, the early mornings, the late nights and man was that a wonderful experience. there was this one guy, Sameer. He was working in BCG london back then as a project lead iirc and he used to spend 3 hours with a random 20 year old teaching him everything there is about consulting and not just one day, it was like 10 days. he didn’t get anything out of it. he just did it to help a younger bitsian out. i love that so much. that is exactly why i am always happy(more than happy tbh) if someone asks for help from me. damn if i could change someone’s life for the good, that would be insane. thank you Sameer, you did change my life for good. on the interview day of BCG, i had my first round and it was a quick 15 min round as the guy taking it was travelling and i got rejected. just 15 mins and you are done. no second chances. all the early morning 6 am preparations, all the sticking to late night schedule and then getting up early regardless for the 3 hour calls, everything that i did for the past 25 days gone down the drain, right? honestly 3rd year harsh would have thought so but not 4th year harsh. i was pretty bummed for sure but we had all of these big shot companies coming in 3-4 days for coding roles and i had coded my ass off before bcg and summer internships preparation so i went back to it. i still believed in myself. you wouldn’t believe me but i think the reason i got offers from amazon and capital one(i gave 2 interviews, cleared them both) was because i had prepared for BCG. i could feel my answers were so much more structured now. i used to think clearly. frame my answers better. so yeah, your boi ended up with 2 offers in the end of day 1. i chose capital one since it was starting out as a company in india and i thought it would be like a startup(which was partly true and partly false) and my homie from college also got in. we started living together, working together, kinda spending a lot of time together which two toxic ambitious males shouldn’t tbh. that was the first time i started making enough money that i didn’t have to worry about my basic needs or wants anymore. i could finally spend on my parents, my friends, my brother without feeling oh but what will happen. that feeling is good. to anyone who says, money can’t buy happiness. you are both right and wrong. for people who haven’t seen a lot of money in life, they should play the money game for a bit. its worth it. you will learn a lot about yourself. you will earn money. you will love spending it on your fam and friends. that’s a 11/10 experience. i wish everyone gets to experience that someday(i think you will anon, keep going) towards the end of the first year of working as a corporate slave, two of our college seniors got into YC and were building voice ai agents for HVAC companies(h/t to broccoli.com, abhishek, aditya and somil) and that was the first time me and my friend kinda got to know about the world in SF we started looking more into it. damn. i remember the first time i read about yc and funding and starting companies. i didn’t know that kinda ambition was possible before then. i got to feel first hand how far ahead the technology is in silicon valley when compared to the rest of the world. i wanted more. i left my corporate MNC job and joined a smaller startup (~30-50 people) as a data scientist. i learnt a lot. we had amazing founders and an even better team(shoutout to everyone at Sundial), made a few close friends there. post that stint, i wanted to work in a yc company. not any yc company, the one which just started. the one where things would break everyday. the one where you are the marketing, product, frotnend, backend, customer support and so i started cold emailing founders who had just raised money in yc. 50 emails. no replies. 100 emails, 1 reply. 200 emails, 4 replies. 300 emails, 10 replies. got interviewed for one of them and joined @alexcodes ai with the most cracked(genuinely) coder i have had the pleasure of working with. good thing was, he was also my founder. we were building the cursor for xcode. we were competing directly with cursor and windsurf for market space and goddamn what a feeling that was. every customer felt a huge win. every churn felt like a loss. i used to reach out to people who cancelled their subscription just to kinda know why they thought it wasn’t worth it. i still sremember the busy days, the ones where we pushed a new version and it had bugs and we would spend hours solving bugs, talking to everyone on discord but by the end of it all it was worth it. i had gotten my chance to work with an amazing founder in a company i loved building a product that was changing lives. i remember some tweets where people would say “can’t imagine coding ios apps ever again without alex” and honestly, those were the highlights of my days. now i work as a founding engineer at Lumari. we help supply chain companies build agents on top of their existing ERPs and workflows and it has been super fun so far. oh also, Alexcodes got acquired by OpenAI and my goat Daniel has joined Codex. i am on a flight to SF. this is my first time going out of my country. a younger version of me couldn’t even dream of going out of country. just somewhere out of city would have been enough for him. my life has been as easy and as difficult as yours and like everyone else’s. while so much more is to be done, i’m happy and grateful to god for a lot of things i have been lucky to achieve in life. to anyone who is struggling rn to make sense of their life, who is struggling to make ends meet, who is struggling to get a job, i can’t say anything that would make it easier for you. i’ll just tell you that its possible. i’ve done it and so can you. just persevere a little bit longer. just work a bit harder. keep going. i love this quote from someone, “till death all defeat is psychological” you didn’t crack an interview? big whoop you were fired from a company? big whoop you got dumped? big whoop yeah. big whoop(thanks ted lasso) you can and will come back from everything in your life even if everything seems to be going wrong right now. that’s not a nice place to be but there is a way out. there is always a way out. you can do it anon. i believe in you. grateful and excited for everything that’s yet to come :) signing off, the boy who took his first flight at 22.

every time i'm building an agent, i go back and read this absolutely banger article by @AnthropicAI on building agents which was written in 2024

this is so hype, thank you for this @jxnlco its incredibly powerful to know that YOU are the one making every single choice. good, bad, worst, best. its you who makes it and its you who can change your life by changing your choices :) go READ. jxnl.co/writing/2024/06/01/a…

i’m so excited for personal software, YES. show me how you are weird. unique. amazing. THANKS :)

wrote this exactly 3 months ago and kinda crazy how none of this is super useful anymore, the software world moves so fast man

wow really had to send this to gpt to explain me if 6 sol is good or bad

bombay era is so on

its kinda weird how if im not active on twitter for a while, it replaces all my previous interests in for you page w whats trending and its usually p terrible hate tweets or things im not interested in at all, idk if this is an attempt to make me more active but ig its working😭

incredible read re. doomer-ism what stands out is the fact that the smartest people on our planet(arguably the people at openai and anthropic) know this and still kinda choose to “win” and think that that’s more important but win what exactly? more shareholder value? the status of “we solved agi”? the short term money when they ipo? it sometimes surprises me how we can say we are so smart that we could change the world but fail to look 5 years down the line? i’m not from research and so not deeply informed about the sota models they have access to but the argument that others will do it so we are gonna HAVE to be the first ones to end the world doesn’t really make sense to me idk man @sama @DarioAmodei should we put more normal people into deciding what happens to the future of humanity? by more normal i mean “not researchers, not engineers” but in general people who’d think more about the humanity side of things rather than the shareholder value most of the human race is powerless in this situation and i’m sure this post won’t reach you guys but man i wish it does and you splurge a few millions hiring people, normal people or in general population consensus into deciding what happens to them im usually v anti doomerism and i think its a net positive to have that mindset but i think this should be THE PROBLEM to solve for before AGI i can write the code if im alive man