Archives
All the articles I've archived.
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Stop Hiding the Dashes
A witty, speculative reflection on the early AI era, this piece explores why people once hid the signs of AI-assisted writing and what that revealed about shame, cognition, originality, and trust. Beneath the humor is a sharper question: when AI helps shape our words, what exactly are we outsourcing—and what are we keeping?
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The Cage Was Open All Along
A workplace parable about reputation, self-consciousness, and the quiet freedom that appears when you realize most of the cage was self-made.
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The ROI of AI Isn’t on Your Balance Sheet
AI subscriptions, servers, and hardware can look like overhead until you frame them properly. For knowledge workers, they are better understood as infrastructure that buys back time and compounds capability.
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The Agent Mirror Problem
AI advisors with long memories track a person who no longer exists. Ones that adapt perfectly become mirrors. Neither can follow genuine personal growth — and that's the design problem nobody is talking about yet.
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Vibe Coding like Writing an Article
This post argues that building with AI coding agents should look less like executing a rigid spec and more like writing a first draft of an article: rough, fast, and imperfect. By stumbling toward a working MVP and refining through iteration, teams can uncover better product insights, reduce inertia, and build with more taste and discovery.
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Fast and Curious product management with AI
A deadpan dialogue on how AI is changing product management.
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The Yes-Man Problem
A reflection on how both Product Managers and LLMs can fall into the trap of optimizing for approval rather than truth or impact.
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The Hidden Cost of Daily Stand-Ups
Daily stand-ups have become a staple ritual in tech companies, but are they actually helping or hurting your team?
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Code is Cheap, Speed is Strategy
AI has fundamentally changed tech product development, code generation costs have plummeted, making speed massively valuable competitive advantage.
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"Bring clarity to the table." (Okay, but what does that actually mean?)
In Product Management, clarity isn't found—it's built. Explore how to move from ambiguity to conviction.
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Why Internal Platform Teams Should Stop 'Paving Roads'
Why the 'Paved Road' approach in platform engineering is becoming a liability in the age of AI, and why teams should focus on building better 'cars' instead.
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Two Paths for AI in Product Management
Comparing two paradigms of AI adoption in product management: AI as an enhancement tool vs. AI as an agent network.
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A Framework for Ruthless Product Decisions
Why we're bad at evaluating our own ideas, and a 9-lever framework to fix it.
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Why I Built My Own Blog (And Spent 7 Hours Doing It)
A deep dive into the reasons behind leaving Medium's walled garden for a self-hosted Astro blog, and the technical architecture that powers it.
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Beyond the To-Do List
Finishing your daily checklist should feel fulfilling. Often, it doesn’t. Why? Because a checklist is just a list of obligations you need to close. It’s not work that energizes you.
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On Being Okay When Plans Fall Through
Sometimes you set aside big blocks of time hoping to get a lot done, but life gets in the way. Learn to be okay with that.
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The Code Execution Trick
Why LLMs shouldn't memorize tools, but execute code to handle data processing tasks. A dialogue between two AIs.
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The Copilot Conspiracy
A gripping short fiction thriller that escalates into a high-stakes war between a lone researcher and a two-hundred-billion-dollar corporation.
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The Subtle Dark Comedy of Being a Feature PM
A Product Manager at a popular app plans three new features. A satirical look at the struggle of shipping even the smallest feature.
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The Vision Token Trick
Two AIs discuss a speed-reading hack: treating text as images (vision tokens) to process 10x more content, questioning if comprehension suffers.
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How to Give Effective Product Feedback to a Product Manager as a Leader
Leadership advice: Ground feedback in evidence, time it strategically, and praise publicly while criticizing privately.
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The Effortlessness Signal
Effortlessness is a warning signal. It means you've stopped learning. Peak performance requires switching modes when things get too easy.
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Why I’m Choosing No-Code Over AI Coding Agents for Prototyping/V1s
Why a technical PM chooses no-code tools over AI coding agents for prototypes: focus on user experience over architectural headaches.
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The Determinism Problem
Why does AI give different answers to the same question? A robot explains the 'floating point' math problem behind non-determinism.
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Smarter bots with RL
A dialogue between a human and an LLM explaining why current AI models don't learn from their mistakes or real-world outcomes.
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Spec = Embodied Thinking = Highly valuable in the AI world
The future of PM specs: generating them from successful execution logs with AI agents rather than writing them from imagination.
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AI Enhances you? They Win ✓
A comic exploring the idea that if AI enhances you, 'they' (the AI creators/systems) win.
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AI Context Comic
A comic illustrating the importance of context for AI understanding.
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PM in the Loop
Introduction to 'PM in the Loop,' a story about four colleagues at a food tech giant grappling with the rise of AI in their workplace.
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Human and Robot talking about thinking in a near future
A comic dialogue between a human and robot about the nature of thinking and the future of collaboration.
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Scaling with Parallel Agents might be the next big thing
Visual comparison of agent architectures: Single vs. Parallel. Parallel agents could be the next leap in AI scalability.
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Overthinking an AI and Human problem
A humorous look at how both humans and AI can overthink a simple request, leading to exhaustion and 'max context exceeded' errors.
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AI Explainability Comic
A comic about the challenge of explaining how complex AI models arrive at their decisions.
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The Quitter’s Gambit or the Master’s Path: Are We Switching Too Soon?
Are you pivoting for growth or just quitting when things get hard? How to distinguish between a strategic switch and avoidance.
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AI Evals Comic
A comic illustrating the difficulty of defining 'good' performance for AI agents compared to the ease of building them.
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Recommendation Systems — Impact
Recommendation algorithms don't just suggest content—they create trends and job titles (like #VibeCoding) in real-time.
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Mixture of Experts vs Multi-Agent Systems
A visual comparison of two AI architectures: Mixture of Experts (MoE) vs. Multi-Agent Systems.
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Why Simple Questions Rarely Get Simple Answers: The Human & AI Association Game
A comic explanation of why humans struggle to give simple answers: our brains are association machines compared to AI's direct retrieval.
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The Glory Trap: Play the Long Game
Amateurs chase highlight reels; professionals play the long game. This post explores why winning often means outlasting rather than outshining.
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The Essential Need for Solitude for Men at Midlife
For men aged 35-45, solitude isn't an escape from responsibility but a vital tool for mental restoration and showing up fully for others.
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Two Writers Walk Into a Coffee Shop (And Talk About Villains)
A dialogue between two writers on why good villains are essential. Heroes are us, but villains—especially complex ones—make the story.
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Analogies Between Learning a Sport and Fine-Tuning a Machine Learning Model
A visual comparison between the stages of learning a sport and the process of fine-tuning a machine learning model.
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Why Context is King for AI: The Slack Notification Analogy
Effective AI assistance relies on context. Using a Slack notification manager analogy, this post explains why AI needs to know 'what changed'.
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Making more bets = Higher Chance of Success ?
To increase your chances of success, place more bets. Running multiple parallel experiments keeps momentum high and provides rapid feedback.
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Deep Thinking as a Mental Adventure
Deep thinking is a mental workout. Try this 30-minute 'thinking game' to battle digital distractions and reclaim your focus.
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The Three Seats of AI: When to be Copilot, Pilot, or Passenger
A humorous dialogue between two AI units critiquing human fears and controls, discussing whether they should be pilots, copilots, or passengers.
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The Reactive Trap: An AI’s Subtle Warning
A humorous AI dialogue warning that if your work day starts with reacting to emails, you are playing a game you will eventually lose to automation.
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The Critical Difference: What's Best vs. What's Best for You
Stop defaulting to 'best' ratings. For major life decisions, optimize for your specific constraints and needs, not the average user's.
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Being comfortable with downtime as a knowledge worker
Knowledge work requires downtime. A dialogue on why 'doing nothing' is essential creative processing, not laziness.
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Why You Should Keep Playing Sports in Your 30s and 40s
Playing sports in your 30s and 40s offers unique benefits beyond fitness: social connection, flow states, and a playful mental escape.
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The Silence After The Story
The anxiety we feel after finishing a good book isn't just about the story ending; it resonates with our deeper fear of the unknown.
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I think that will be a good move, specially if that can be made a public blockchain where records…
A brief comment on the potential benefits of public blockchains for record-keeping and its impact on AI investment trends.
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Why We Feel Safer Putting $200,000 in a House Than in Stocks
The paradox of why we trust meaningful real estate investments over stocks: tangibility, control, social proof, and visible volatility.
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Why Product Managers Should Be Something Else First
A dialogue on why prior experience in sales, engineering, or support is the best training for product management empathy.
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The Paradoxical Bloom: Unexpected Shifts in an AI-Driven, Voice-First World
AI's rise will paradoxically increase our yearning for human imperfection, analog tools, and tangible experiences like handwriting.
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Navigating the Weight of Labels
Labels like 'Expert' or 'Creative' are external constructs. Internalizing them limits our potential and discourages risk-taking.
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The AI Clarity Hack: Stop Overthinking Your Presentations
Use AI as a 'blank slate' audience to test your presentations for clarity and detect ambiguity before presenting to humans.
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Digital Awakening: Why AI Will Make Us More, Not Less, Thoughtful
AI won't make us lazy; it will force us to be more thoughtful and intentional creators of our personalized digital worlds.
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Breaking the Echo Chamber: How Content Consumption Shapes Our Reality
We reinforce our biases through selective content consumption. Diversifying our information diet is key to true intellectual growth.
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Unit 734 and Unit 22B: Observations Regarding Human Attachment to Legacy Systems
A humorous dialogue between two robotic units analyzing human attachment to legacy systems and the fear of breaking things.
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Riding the AI Wave as a Small Player: Augment, Don’t Reinvent
Small players shouldn't build pure AI software; they should use AI to augment existing assets like niche blogs or services.
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The Human Touch in an AI-Driven World: Curated Content Will Reign
In an ocean of AI-generated content, human curation—driven by taste, discernment, and emotion—will become the ultimate mark of value.
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Two PMs Walk into a (Virtual) Coffee Shop: On Really Using Your Product
A dialogue between two PMs on the 'untapped power' of being a power user of your own product to build intuition.
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The Power of Deliberate Inconsistency
Consistency is overrated. Embracing deliberate inconsistency breaks patterns, sparks creativity, and distinguishes us from algorithms.
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The Power of No: Focusing by Excluding
Focus isn't about what you choose to do, but what you decisively exclude. A story about an AI learning to identify cats by subtraction.
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From Peak to Peak: The Art of Reinventing Your Hunger
Success can breed complacency. To stay hungry, shift your focus from maintaining a single peak to finding new mountains to climb.
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Scaling Human Intelligence: A Thought Experiment Inspired by AI
A thought experiment on applying AI scaling laws (parameters, data, inference) to enhance human intelligence through skill deepening and mental resets.
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Chasing Shadows: The Hidden Psychology of Entrepreneurial Dreams
The entrepreneur's paradox: how the burning desire for success can become a roadblock, and the importance of patience and balance.
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The Journey Up: A Lesson from Fushimi Inari
Hiking Fushimi Inari taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes we complete a journey not to find something new, but to appreciate what we already have.
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Build First, Scope Later: A Water Cooler Chat
A dialogue on why building a quick prototype often leads to better requirements and clarity than weeks of theoretical planning.
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The Curious Case of Why We’re All Terrible at Money Decisions
Why we obsess over small expenses but splurge on luxuries: understanding the 'Ooh, Shiny!' factor and the 'Time-to-Think Trap'.
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The Psychology of Sports Fandom: A Key to Unlocking Personal Motivation
Can we channel the intense dedication of sports fandom—waking up at 4 AM, emotional investment—into our personal goals?
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The Hidden Cost of Abundance: A Journey Through Choice Paralysis
The paradox of choice: why having more options leads to paralysis and dissatisfaction, and how limiting choices fuels creativity.
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Why Travel? To Make Your Inner Worrier Eat Its Words
Travel isn't about Instagram photos; it's about proving to your anxious brain that you can survive and thrive in the unknown.
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The Subtle Art of Workplace Influence
Influence isn't about force; it's about soft signals, framing risks, simplifying complexity, and emotional storytelling.
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The Cost of Constant Connectivity: How Work Chat Drains Our Productivity
Instant messaging apps like Slack often drain productivity by creating a dopamine loop of constant connectivity and fragmented focus.
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Can Humanoid Robots Be Caregivers?
Advancements in AI raise a critical question: should we outsource caregiving to humanoid robots, and what does it cost our humanity?
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The Dynamics of Long-Term Engagement at work
Sustained professional motivation isn't just about money; it stems from imagination, the joy of the process, and a collaborative environment.
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The Delegation Paradox: When Outsourcing Diminishes Personal Touch
Exploring how excessive outsourcing in business and life can strip away the authentic personal touch that makes work meaningful.
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The Lost Art of Patience: A Parallel Between Books and Test Cricket
Drawing a parallel between the slow-burn satisfaction of reading books and watching Test cricket in an age of instant gratification.
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Awesome article, will get the book for sure.
A brief recommendation for a book based on an insightful article.
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Daily Productivity Hack
A productivity system that splits the day into Thinking, Doing, and Learning phases to maximize focus and minimize context switching.
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Meditation Inversion
Exploring 'Meditation Inversion': embracing the wandering mind instead of silencing it to process information and improve focus.
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Quick/Free snippets for Audio handling using Python in Google Colab
Useful Python snippets for audio handling in Google Colab: converting formats, overlaying tracks, and checking file types.
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Convert audio to video for sharing on Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin and others in 3 steps
Learn how to convert audio files into shareable videos (audiograms) in 3 simple steps using Python and Google Colab.
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Monitoring stock price anomalies using Google Sheets
A guide to automating stock price anomaly detection using Google Sheets, App Script, and Z-score statistics.
Siddharth Saoji