Tanvi Bhakta

[Blog] Birthday Blues Purples

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:46:00 GMT

I used to have a complicated relationship with my birthday. I have spent the better part of my adulthood pretending it didn't exist. Because I used to hate being alive, I didn't want to celebrate that I was still here. I also didn't understand the social games people played with gifts, and expectations they had around their own birthdays and parties. If I didn't acknowledge mine, surely I could opt out of the concept entirely?

A good friend changed some of this a few years ago by demanding care in the form of acknowledging and celebrating their birthday, and expecting (good) gifts. Because I loved them, I obliged. Now I am in a much healthier place with my own.

What I did this year

My birthday fell on a Sunday! And the Saturday was a gfgf - so I took myself out to a good party, dressing up, looking hot, and knowing that I can show myself a good time. I went alone (didn't have the energy to make plans with friends) but immediately met 12 people i know (bangalore queer circles are MUCH bigger than they were in 2016, but they're still small enough! What can I say) and really just danced. Bodies feel so good when they do what you want.

I woke up on Sunday with a mild hangover and a craving for ramen, so I took myself to Kuuraku, did some shopping after, and came back home just in time for some dearest friends to trickle into a small hang Shru had very kindly decided to make happen at my place. We hung out, then I changed into my pajamas and went to bed at 10pm. Fantastic day, couldn't have asked for more.

How did this happen?

I am finally able to be alone and take joy in my own company. I don't how to tell you how to make that happen. Maybe a decade of therapy? Somehow, when I am by myself now, I am a 29-year-old adult with a full and fascinating life, not a 5-year-old girl left to entertain herself for hours and days and weeks on end. I am not afraid to be by myself. I can take care of myself not just physically but also spiritually, emotionally. For the first time in my life, over the last year I have repeatedly chosen spending time with myself over (excellent!) company, and had a good time.
I have proof that people exist and they love me. This isn't a birthday thing - it is a feeling that follows me every day, throughout the year. Birthdays in popular culture are made out to be this big production where the day is supposed to be all about you/a way for people to show you who they are to you. But that is fake! (and also capitalism). So I've learnt to slowly let go of the expectation of a big thing, and look at what I do have and revel in that. I also did get several messages wishing me and the reminder felt good :)
Knowing that I didn't have to stress about plans for the day but was still going to meet friends was incredibly freeing. I am so, so grateful to Shru for making this happen. I was initially excited about throwing a big party, but I spent the whole week before (and the week after) my birthday dealing with a really intense conflict and I was not in the space to plan or engage with other people. But she created group, set up snacks and punch, and coordinated people. My home is always set up for having guests so nothing else needed to be done. Doing emotional and intellectual labour for me is always its own gift, and this one was so lovely!

I'm looking forward to the next several decades of birthdays!

[Weeknotes] Week of Months of May, June, July, August 2026

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Quarter note

it’s been three[^1] months and I haven’t figured out how to write worknotes yet. That doesn’t mean its not valuable, it means I haven’t sat down and figured out how to remove most friction from the process have unconsciously given me.
I now realise I still need some form of public storytelling because over larger periods I lose the narrative that weeknotes have unconsciously given me. I thought I would stop writing weeknotes! Considered pivoting to worknotes, and considered giving them up entirely in favor of more blog posts. I have written more blog posts in the last 4 months than I would have, but I don't think it needed to come at the cost of weeknotes. I have missed the process of writing these every. single. week.
I spent 7 days in Srinagar at the end of May (sad beautiful tragic plays in the background). It brought up a lot of shit I didn’t realise I had in me around growing up in an authoritarian state. Ate excellent food. Braved the cold. Did not die. Did not see snow. Saw many birds. Saw large lakes. Saw no nice orchards. Did not touch snow. Needed a week to recover from the experience.
Went to Akshata’s place after a long time! Didn’t play board games, but it was nice to hang out with the Achievable Goals group after forever.
Took the parents out to Burma Burma for their anniversary. They really enjoyed it. They’ve been coming home a lot more in the last few months, I’m not sure what changed. They’ve finally decided to do something about the large backlog of tasks that show up when one runs a household that I’d asked them for help with over two years ago, and I’m very grateful.
- Figured out what inverter I should buy, then bought it and got it installed
- got plug points installed in the bathrooms
- fixed my geyser
- Got me a great deal on a dyson
- my car had a rat infestation! Along with a cousin, took it to the mechanic multiple times to get rid of it.
In his old age, I’m seeing my dad’s emotions and character in a way I wasn’t able to before. He gave me the gory details of his teeth replacement surgery, and broke up a fight mum and I were having. I like having my parents in my life. I had resigned myself to a life without them knowing me, so this feels like such a gift.
Abhinav, Ankur, and I spent a lot of time and effort on putting together a day of lightning talks to celebrate a year of running IndieWebClub.
- Recordings on youtube!
I have acquired a set of nesting vessels and a small cast iron pan perfect for eggs
- the set of nesting vessels is a traditional wedding gift for konkani women. Given that the gift is primarily meant for women establishing a household, I emotionally manipulated my mum into getting me a set. She put lots of effort into it; I am very touched.
Nunchai is excellent. I developed a small dependency and then had to wean myself off when the gut wasn’t happy about it.
Work became extremely intense and in six weeks, (predictably) the body gave up. Then I set very strict limits for myself + there was a small reorg as we moved to the next prototype which significantly changed how I think about the actual work I’m doing (reminders I wrote for engineers using LLMs) - specifically, I’m able to think about the larger product + the larger architecture more now that I’m not sweating the details. I suppose I did have to spend ten months caring about bullshit before being able to identify it from smell alone.
Pranav and Sindhu got married! The venue of the wedding was beautiful, pared down and gorgeous - and most importantly, there was a big board game table. I finally played a big board game after two years! Terraforming Mars, with Roshni and Nihar. We were the last people at the venue by about an hour, but we finished it!
Roshni ran a 25k in Yercaud. Sohom ran a 35k in Pune. I am very happy for my friends and will not be tempted into the pit of despair that is long distance running training. No, I am perfectly happy up here running my 5ks.
This time, when the body gave up, it took the brain with it. I lost all my mornings for at least 6 weeks. I stopped football, I stopped running, I stopped even being able to do a stretch. Things finally got better two weeks ago. But I went from being able to play 2 football games back to back (3 hour of on-off explosive running!) to not being able to spend even half an hour on the court without my core burning. Why does the body have to undergo such a drastic reset every time there is a break? I am sad but I know I have to make my peace with it. I will spend my whole life trying to walk up this hill.
I went to this talk about pitching your voice being given by a voice therapist- specifically in the context of gender presentation. I am interested in being able to change the long term register of your voice without causing stress to your vocal cords. I had a vocal chord injury ten years ago now that robbed me of several octaves. It’s been a decade but it is still hard to acknowledge this; which means I haven’t been able to put effort into [“fixing it”|”working around it”].
Anyway, the session itself made me feel like I was back in a classroom (in the worst way) but it did open my mind to lots of options that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
Need to keep reminding myself that the word “harness” now has a special meaning in the LLM world. So what do I call the way I build applications now?
I accompanied a friend to a medical procedure where they were under anesthesia. It was hilarious. I enjoy listening to my friends talk about sofas that dance in front of the door that leads to unicorn land. I also like knowing that we are there for each other like this. Me and my village against the world.
Jalebi was under anesthesia for dental scaling (he is showing early signs of gingivitis). This was not as fun. This was happening in the middle of my worst flare and just as I was recovering from the burnout, so I scheduled 4-5 friends to come over and care give (with) me for the 48 hours after. Friends, when I tell you how unnecessary this was. The last time when Litchee was recovering I remember it being hell. It took over 24 hours just for the anesthetic to leave his body, and another 32 for him to be able to eat without smooshing his face against the bowl + not hide away the whole time. But Jalebi? The desire to big yell that courses through his veins burned any anesthetic up so fast he was up and ready to go before we even took him home. Whew. I…
But Jalebi and Jamun have certified Tummy Issues™, and are now on a 2 month course of probiotics + folic acid supplements. Just when I thought things were easier with Litchee’s dental woes ending.
In the process of dealing with all the cat care, I referred to this blog several times, to see if I had actually done the things I’d set up on the calendar or marked as complete on the todo list. My weeknotes are a source of truth in a way that my other surfaces are not, because they help me reconstruct the emotional state of mind I was in at a given point in time, in a way that mere facts do not. This means I now have a good reason to build a search feature into the site. It also means that these notes are independently useful outside of the reasons I listed here. I’m glad I took this break from writing it, because it illustrated very clearly why this was ill-advised.
I told my parents that I couldn’t come to a vacation that they had (failed to) schedule because I was scheduled to go to a party and get drunk. They were stressed. Dad called me several times and wanted to know who would take care of me. Sir, that time has long passed. I am now going to parties in order to take care of other people despite being drunk points to all the baby gays
I cut my hair. It is now very short. First, I cut it myself into an asymmetric bob. Then, Sahiti cut it shorter. Then, I went to a men's barber and got a katori cut!! I am entering a new age of hair experimentation. Maybe this time I will color my hair. Maybe I will get frosted tips?!
I really, really enjoy shopping with and for the people I love. Spent half a day with a friend at a fashion exhibition, spent three hours on video call with a friend in a different country thrifting, spent half a day in a mall with a third friend buying shirts for an upcoming trip. Fashion is so important to me. i want to put more of my expeirmentation out into the world, but it involves using skills I don't have that are not related; photography, lighting, videography, editing. I wish it were simpler to capture just the joy I get from cool fits and fun outfits.
Ananya, Juhi, Ankur and I drove out of town to see shooting stars! It was the first time I have been successful at seeing them. What an absolutely incredible experience. I love the night sky so much.

My quarter in data

played football x12 times
went on a run x9 times
made bad decisions x17 times. Bad decisions come in three flavors.
hung out with people x times
- at my place x19
- at their place x22
number of times the parents came home x16
dishes cooked x41

Media Consumption

Read

Lots, details on my Goodreads profile (sorry I can’t auto summarize for you here yet. POSSE soon inshallah)

Listening to

I went to the middle room music festival where I discovered there is - more than one form of electronic music - I might like those other forms
Thank you to Devanjal who called it that I liked synthwave. Current artists on the roster include Curtain Blue, The Canons, Late Night Dinner Party, Ariana Grande’s new album, Nightcall, The Daughters, Magdalene Bay.

[^1]: Three months when I started writing this, 4 months at the time of publishing

[Blog] What my hands learn every time I log in

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a certain magic to repetition.

Long ago, in response to a story where someone was forced to change their password every three months, I read advice to make that password something that they wanted to focus on. Yes, we have touch ID, but I still type in my password 7 to 12 times a day. So this advice made sense to me. It comes from the same genre as, on the low-effort, low-effect part of the scale, “write out what you want and put it above your bed so it's the first thing you see when you wake up”, and high-effort, high-effectiveness being “Re-design your whole office so that walking through the corridors prepares your mind for the thing you need to spend the next 8 hours focusing on”[^1]

What you pay attention to, grows.

Your subconscious mind is paying attention to the things your hands are doing, even if you don't really notice. Four years ago, I changed the login password on all my laptops to publish. Just the one word. I had been frustrated with wanting to write, but that frustration wasn’t helping me write. Or I was writing, but then I was letting it die in my drafts. I wanted to write and see it through!

For the next year and a half, every few hours as I would type the word publish (whether I actively paid attention or not) my subconscious brain oriented towards finishing what I had started writing. It paid attention to the barriers stopping me from putting my work out there, and then worked on dismantling them. I didn’t have a blog on the website, so I wrote on mataroa. I felt like I had nothing to say (about anything important), so I wrote weeknotes (and discovered I was wrong). I attended a writing workshop for nerds. I started Writer’s Club. I started Indie Web Club. Here we are.

My next password was to do the boring thing[^2]. It’s no surprise that people don’t do hard things - but we must try, every so often, because only through discomfort can we grow. For me, it was hard to be bored. It was hard to pay attention to any one thing for more than half an hour. I would constantly get distracted, with the flavor of “let me check my messages”, but also, “here is a thought. Why don't I look it up immediately and fall down this rabbit hole where I'm clicking a new link every 90 seconds instead of sitting with this hard problem that I haven't yet taught my brain how to understand?” And so I decided to remind myself, every login, every sudo password, every time I have to unlock my keychain access, to Do The Boring Thing instead.

In the time since this change, I am one year through working the hardest job I have ever worked, the longest hours I have ever worked, learning the most I have ever learnt in my career. I now have conclusive proof that I’m not lazy (take that, depression brain!). I can do boring things. Along the way, I also learned to do the hard things. I don't have to turn the boring things interesting. I can just accept that they need to be done, and sit down and make it happen.

It's time for a new laptop password. While I figure it out, I'm trying to remind myself - there is a certain magic to repetition.

[^1]: Cal Newport: Deep Work. See also: obvious.in office redesign principles (link to exact blog post currently lost to the void)

[^2]: At the end of May 2025, a few friends caught up with Pooja Saxena who was in town for coffee. We were shooting the shit and the conversation turned to how the work just needs to be done. Pooja talked about how her and Prateek kept each other work accountable via gentle ribbing, and also how when her dad (who is now in his sixties!) complains that the work he has to do to get a passion project done is hard, she doesn’t have patience for it because he just has to sit down and do it - and she tells him so. This conversation left a deep impression on me. She is right.

[Blog] Giving baby tanvi what she wants

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been reading since I was four years old because my mother only had so many hours in the day to tell me stories. Her and dad had full time jobs, and I was an intelligent kid - that meant I had to be kept occupied. I was also a lonely kid; so the stories became a lifeline.

Growing children recreate what they know. When my brother was born (and I was handed babysitting duty), I spent so much time making up stories based on characters we saw around us - ben ten, the monkeys on the banana trees, the youtubers of de jure. I wrote the first seven chapters of a fantasy novel set in a high school in America featuring prominently: eggs that cracked to reveal descendants [of whom??] from Atlantis, some standard misunderstood kid bullied situation, and my current crush at the time (a boy I had spent about ten minutes with who had light brown eyes).

My best friend and I learnt P language, wrote parodies of pop songs about loving pizza, and invented new melodies inspired by evanescence. When I was younger, creation was just something I did with all the energy that was generated from consumption and a boredom and a long commute.

Then, I discovered that an internet existed beyond Club Penguin and 4share.com (a website to share pdfs of novels). My most vivid experience of consuming blogs was remittancegirl.com (NSFW) - a blog by an author containing ~~erotica~~ erotic literature that she treating with such care, intention, and quality that I thought... hmm. I would like to be the kind of person that produces work like this.

Failures so far:

Several diaries (I tore them up. Now I regret it. There was a lot of angst that I thought was cringe, but now I just want to hug baby Tanvi and tell her that she is going to grow up and be so good)
Quora answers - I think this counts because I used to go find questions that I wanted to write about and then answer them
A wordpress blog - I couldn’t find the exact URL at the time of posting
A weebly blog - lots of poetry, emotions, sexual/political themes. I hid it from people for a long time but now I think sex is a normal thing for 17-year-olds with inappropriate exposures to the internet to spend a long time thinking about. I might migrate my work from that blog to this one eventually. No, I'm still not going to link to it though, but if you ask me I'll probably tell you!
Medium - mostly for a specific project
Instagram - 2016 to 2019 I used it mostly for archival, and a brief fashion blog. I retired that when a) the mechanics changed to being doom scrolling, and b) I discovered twitter
Twitter - 2018 to 2020. Arguably the most famous I have been on the Internet. I want to an Anthropic event in 2025 (5 years after activity!) and someone asked me if I was tanvi.css. Yes! But also no. I started it because I was doing a lot of networking but I ended up writing about my health, and my personal politics. This changed the kinds of conversations I ended up having with new people, and it felt stifling, so I just quit it one day and didn't look back.

Over the last two years, I have gotten into the habit of writing up my week, and slowly built up the muscle of developing clarity of thought enough to Blog. But I want a real blog - a web log, if you will - that allows me to come back to my own thoughts and track progress, draw conclusions, witness (my) history. I’ve written before about what I want from this blog, and that doesn’t change. But the personal-website side of the internet can be a lonely place, and if I am not fundamentally writing for myself, the writing will not happen.

Big inspiration: visakan’s twitter, itihas.review.

I have very poor autobiographical memory, and I want this blog to be proof-of-life for all my major thoughts. I miss writing about low-stakes bullshit that is nonetheless important to my self-perception. Did the tree really fall in the forest if no one was there to hear it? My lonely 4-year-old self just wants to be heard to know that she exists, and everything that has followed has been in pursuit of making that happen.

[Blog] Notes on running

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

14 days ago: I have been playing football regularly but I'm pretty shit. A friend kindly offered to start from the basics with me and we did a bunch of passing drills... 40 minutes of passing drills, using only my right leg. Then we played a 50 minute game, and then we drank juice and went home. No cool down.

12 days ago: I woke up bright and early and had movement coiled up in my body. In about 5 minutes after waking I had shoes on, and I was off. I thought I'd take it casually. No looking at the time/pace/distance - just 140bpm runs. Guys. I did a 5k and I didn't even realise it. It was my first time running such a long distance! I also did a PR for my kilometer time. I was so incredibly excited. I did a decent warm up and a nice long cool down.

12 days ago: The bloating.... The burps. I was so uncomfortable. Apparently this is a normal thing that happens with runners? A friend has a collection of photoes of runners who have shit themselves. But this was unexpected, and I was annoyed. Why was my body trying to sabotage me? Little did I know...

10 days ago: I woke up bright and early and had movement coiled up in my body. In about 5 minutes after waking I had shoes on, and I was off. I stood in front of a house to do my stretches before I ran. I did one squat, and heard a snap from my thigh, and felt a sharp pain! I strained my right adductor. A combination of lots of movement, lack of sleep, an incline, and a squat too deep will do that. Who knew?

Needless to say, I didn't play either of the two football games I had scheduled for that weekend. I didn't drive anywhere because the motion of it would stress the muscle. I couldn't sit bisexually. Do you know all the things you use your adductor for? I have slowly, and painfully, spent the last week finding out.

Today morning: I ran again. I have travel coming up and I wanted to be sure I would be okay. I did a simple 1k, and walked another 1k. Long and shallow static stretches after. I've kept up my creatine-and-protien-shake routine to help with recovery. I'm a little sore as I write this but Inshallah I will be able to run by a lake and climb a mountain and play in snow without injuring myself further on my trip.

[Weeknotes] Month of April

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Month note again

Life

What a set of weekends. By April 14th I had slept at 4am for 5 days straight - that Sunday saw me almost reach a reasonable bedtime but then a friend needed some rescuing from a place far away. I am comfortable telling friends to fuck off but there is a class of problems that I will always respond to, as part of my personal code. So I drove the car Nats very kindly lent me an hour to pick up the friend and bring them back. Then at like 6am after feeding the friend I put the friend in the bed Nats very kindly lent me and took the couch where I didn’t realise how time passed until I woke up.
I’m very fire nation in the way I can’t be asleep when the sun is up so Sunday (April 12th) was very grumpy and I may have not been as nice as I liked. But I got tipsy and looked at water and didn’t pet a horse.
Monday (April 13) I needed to go home. So I made the decision at 6pm and was in my own bed in Bangalore by midnight. I love my life. I even got a friend to come over that evening to help debug my brain. Bless.
The couch broke three times in ten days. It is currently turned over as we speak.
I discovered the joy of a Dyson V8. My cushion covers look a different colour! And maybe I understand why my allergies are so bad at home. I need to get the dust mites out of everything, and soon.
This Saturday at IWC 27 people showed up even though we only put out tickets three days before the event. Yay!
I styled a piece I have had in my closet since October 2024. I felt like a fairy. 10/10
I met finally met Sohom’s parents. This year will be ten years of knowing Sohom, and eating Kolkatta biryani his mom made was something special :)
Harshal turned 30 in my house! So we threw a party, it was lovely. I need to do another soon.
Shruti held a dissent in poetry writing workshop at underline.center that was incredibly powerful. I was having a day so I embarrassed myself by nearly crying in my introduction. Poetry can destabilise and ground in strange and scary ways.
Anik hosted a dinner at his lovely flat in [very far away] that I’m so glad I made the effort to go to. Excellent food and company - and I finally got to meet Malcolm!
I spent 3 soul-healing hours at DMart with Calra choosing boxes. Buy groceries with friends, it is always more fun to do errands together.
I did a chill Sunday morning with Matcha and Roshni.
I have acquired a Stanley cup. I am now regularly drinking 6L of water a day so this is an objectively excellent thing. (I need to drink more than the recommended amount because I take both protein shakes and creatine)

I’m realising that my identity is mostly made up of the people I surround myself with and the things I do. So in any decision I need to make, I don’t ask myself “what will I like” but instead “does this sound fun to me and the people I love?”. This means that I’m good at creating community and I’m the plan maker in the group, but if you take that away, I don’t really know who I am, and what I want. This year is the year of centering myself and finding out.

My decision making framework is “say yes if it sounds fun”. And I have large batteries so I say yes to lots of things, and I feel like I’ve lived such an excellent whole life already. Now I’m a little... bored of making decisions that way. I don’t want to do anything just because it’s fun anymore.

I have done a lot of what childhood Tanvi needed and wanted. I have excellent family and friends to surround myself with. I’m part of several communities where I give and take of myself. I have a job that is challenging and is pushing me to grow in new ways. I have a beautiful home and the skills to feed myself and my loved ones well. And I have the security that I can keep all of these things even if I fall horribly sick again. [^1]

So... what next? I’m going to be a giant nerd. I have been following my curiosities where they lead. It’s been incredibly fulfilling. I’m going to change the way I make decisions to allow for depth and precision (as opposed to the breadth of new experiences I’ve optimised for all this time). It is an incredibly exciting time for me and I’m so glad you’re along for the ride :)

Health

Started an immunotherapy course that will run for three years and involves large amounts of money to bring my dust allergies under control.
As part of starting this course I’m supposed to be on a whole host of antihistamines, steroids, and other medication. What was I actually doing? Nothing 🤡 On Day 7 I noticed that I couldn’t breathe (!) but I didn’t actually do anything about it until Day 10 - my day off - when I was like hmm I have so much energy in my brain but my head hurts and my body hurts I wonder why?? And then had too much brain fog. I had to call two friends - one to help me get the prescription from the doctor and the other to get me the meds. I don’t have an oximeter at home but I could feel that something was wrong, all the shakes that are generally under control came back. God I am such an idiot.
I am now religiously doing nasal spray steroid at 6am, rotahaler at 8am, immunotherapy at 10am, Allegra after food. But I’ll keep the clown makeup on.
good month for movement. Football every weekend. Did pickleball once. I’ve run like 4 times. I did my personal best - a 6min km - on a day I set out to run randomly and didn’t even feel like I was doing much. I don’t know what changed but I’m finally feeling that running is something to look forward to.
last two weeks have been flare. Appetite got worse but I dealt with it. Had two nights of insomnia but I dealt with it. More pain days than usual but I’m dealing with it. Not only have I got this but I’m thriving. God thought she could nerf me with this but she can only try so hard
Brain rotted harder this month than others, ngl. For one, I’m back to thinking in meme. Why. They’re not even good memes, they’re all from 2019.
My attention span is in the gutter. I blame what I’m going to call dopamine-driven programming. I need to go back to a place where I can look at a horizon on a daily basis.

Work

I am really enjoying having a weekend where I am not thinking about work. I am not even going to think about it enough to write this weeknote.

Learning

Things I couldn’t write TILs about but wanted to

how to make black sesame milk
how refresh tokens work
what the crispy layer in Gyoza is made of
the evolutionary path of purrs
The difference between the various kinds of detergent

Things I want to be able to write TILs about but probably won’t

Mafia meta
Straw length vs diameter vs mouth feel

Media Diet

Reading

Finished

All Eyes on Us
Walking Practice

Reading

The City we Became

Watching

Thanks Nats, for putting me on Heated Rivalry. You know I love fan fiction, and I enjoy good cinematography, so I am so down for high quality romance fan fiction on the screen. I have only watched two episodes so far. I am... savouring it. Talk about Yu(u)ri on Ice.

I also started Hacks! I love shows that don’t center traditional romances. Hacks follows a young idealistic frankly innappropriate for the workplace comedy writer and her employer, a 70yo proudly politically incorrect well established comedian.

I don’t think I’ve seen a single straight character on this show yet...

Listening

Did I talk about Daft Punk last time? I did. Shruti did me the honour of making me a personal disco playlist (that I can’t link to because it is private) which I have been playing non stop. But I can’t think of any other artist or sound that has captured my imagination as nicely.

[^1]: Just typing this all out and reading this makes it feel both unreal and like a precious thing that must be protected. I’ll be asking my mom to remove kann tonight. But I am not alone. I am safe, I have home, I am loved. What a gift this is.

[Blog] TIL: Fixing it when my right arm gets useless

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Problem

Something happens to the muscles in my right shoulder, and my whole right arm becomes useless. The strength in it drops by at least a third - which means I can’t lift things, move things, etc. Typing takes a lot out of me and hurts. There’s follow-on effects to this that I won’t type out because it is depressing to dwell on it.

This has been the last of the fibromyalgia symptoms that I’ve been dealing with for over a decade. We did nerve conduction tests and ruled out Carpel Tunnel? The doctor at recoup physiotherapy diagnosed me with thoracic outlet syndrome but tests that Dr Manjesh showed that that was a scam. My current hypothesis is that something is going out of whack in the muscles in my [general shoulder area] that causes the whole kinetic chain of rest and motion in my arm to seize.

When I get like this, there are several solutions I have been using. I’m listing them in order of effectiveness.

Solution 1

Someone with magic fingers releases the tension built up in my neck, shoulders, and pecs. This gives me about 3 or so hours with mostly no symptoms back.

Solution 2

I exercise regularly and correctly, so the tension doesn’t build up in the first place. Not always possible to do because other fatigue factors are involved.

Solution 3

I use a tennis ball to press out knots in the general area of my shoulder/back. Since most of the tension is *above* my shoulder and in the sides of my neck, it is never possible to get this completely.

Solution 4

Targeted exercises for neck, back, shoulders. Targeted to *what*, though?

Sahiti was kind enough to spend about an hour helping me understand the motions and debug this with me.

Discovery 1: Tennis ball on the infraspinatus muscle

Find the long edge of your shoulder blade.
On the inside, at the top next to the knobby bit is where the back attachment of the muscle is.
Press on the back attachment and feel it in your pec. That’s how you know it is the right muscle. Roll the tennis ball on the back attachment point to loosen the tension in the muscle as a whole.

Discovery 2: Standing Isometrics

Simple up-down isometrics, or IYTW isometrics against the wall several times, is enough to relax the set of muscles. Make sure your ribcage is flush against the wall. It shouldn’t flare. If it does, the exercise won’t be able to do its job. When you do the isometric correctly, you’re forced to put down your shoulders and work your mid-back. This will untense your infraspinatus and move more effort into the mid back.

Discovery 3: Mountain pose grounding

Stand with both your feet on the ground. Be heavy, send all your energy into the ground. Feel like your feet are large boulders damaging the ground. The energy you are sending into the ground should also flow up through your torso and head (newton's third law, remember?). This is the way you should feel when you're doing tango, so you will likely make all the mistakes you make there, here as well. Harness the energy from the ground. Don't disconnect your top half from your bottom half. When you feel centered, and you can feel the energy thrumming in your back, lift your hands up through the sides with an exhale. You can keep them up or join them if you like (I join them). Continue to feel the energy from your weight on the ground traveling up your back. With every further exhale, elongate your spine so that you are reaching up. Your shoulders should be more relaxed now, but if they aren't - let them. Let your shoulders drop and feel the energy that was moving through you move around your sides instead.

Discovery 4: Prone Isometrics

I am unable to isolate and tense my midback. This probably that means my midback isn’t doing as much work as it should be. Shoulders should be chopping, not wrists. Similarly, your midback should be moving your arms, not your shoulder alone. I tried and failed at using standing pull down rows to isolate the midback. IYTW Isometrics while in the lying down superman position does the trick. Form notes: If you use your pecs to pull yourself up and back when you’re lifting yourself, your shoulders will find it easier to drop and your midback can take on more of the work.

This set of exercises lends itself well to the longer term work of identifying and strengthening your mid back so that your infraspinatus doesn’t get overworked and lead to this situation in the first place.

[Weeknotes] Week of Apr 11th, 2026

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Work

Once again, something that was supposed to take two days to do took a whole week. Reasons?

It’s always the scope creep that gets you
Give people who might have opinions a chance to cut scope when on a timeline
Invest in a deploy process that takes not more than a few minutes. Ours currently takes 15 to 25; and it is a PAIN.
We are building a product that contains llms doing turn-based conversations; some (local) e2e tests[^1] therefore necessarily have to be driven by llms (or so I thought, a few months ago). This process also takes about 20 minutes to fully go through. But I’m not giving myself a hard time about this. The whole world is still figuring out best practices around building products that contain LLMS[^2]! I’m so excited to be on the cutting edge; I expect to bleed often.

Also wrote up some reminders to myself while working with LLMs.

I’m very glad we’re moving to serverless. I’m sure this will come with its own issues that I will bemoan, but for now I am excited about

Not having to manage my own worktrees
Having exactly reproducible builds
Starting local in under thirty seconds
Having deploys take not more than a minute (we will still have to contend with ci though)

Health

Good week for movement: We played pickleball sometime during the week, and I ran a 1k home after I got tipsy. I also went dancing! Not too intense and not for too long - we danced for maybe 3 hours, but my body is very happy about getting rid of the energy.

Interesting week for alcohol: I think I drank 4 nights total? Very unlike me; but I didn’t question it, I just went with the flow.

Bad week for sleep: nights of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I went to bed at about 5am and was up by 9.30am.

Also a bad week for working hours: I basically worked all my waking hours on Thursday (and I was up all night that night, soo...)

Threw up on thursday morning, which was the first night I didn't sleep enough - my body basically pushed the panic button. Can't remember the last time I threw up because headache (though maybe this blog contains details?).

I truly don't know how I am still functional. I was this close to leaving for home immediately, but: Goa has the potential to be restful in the way that Bangalore can't even begin. So I decided to have my quiet weekend and my beach days.

Life

God, I have underestimated how much I rely on the physical touch and everyday care of my loved ones on tough weeks to get me through it. After I threw up I was miserable. I would have simply flown home immediately if working with the team was not a commitment (and I didn’t have a client-facing timeline to meet).

I spoke too much Hindi because everyone around me defaults to it. New words:

Bhasad (population)
Layak (capable)
two more I am forgetting :( will note them down next time.

Been thinking a lot of the line the resourcefulness of rot[^3]. And also the line tere zubaan Urdu ki tarah[^4]. One boy over 5 years ago wrote me a poem title The Urdu of you after one very intense 3 day date, and only now am I realising the layers in the verse in it. No, I will not be publishing it for you to read. Yes, you can see if you ask nicely.

In the last two weeks, I ate

Dinner at Jamun: malai broccoli stole the show once again.
Dinner at Jardin: almond something salad? Excellent entre, excellent concept.
Brunch at Indiroom: A Brocc/water chestnut thing was very good.
Dinner at Sublime: they weren’t kidding with that name. Beef Carpaccio. Rack of Lamb.
Coffee Culture: Had the Barista pick out for me a batch of Columbian beans that he did infusion + gravity in the pourer for, to give it more body. Really enjoyed myself. On a different day, had a matcha tender coconut thing that was dumb af. But the servers are excellent and a doggo here chose me (!), so I will be going back.
Dranks at Pablo’s: The mango espresso martini stole the show (but the other specials weren’t trying very hard). A mushroom thing was also excellent.

Other places: GShot (meh), Avo’s Kitchen (decent), Vinayak (pretty good!), Melt pizza (mixed bag), Baba au rhum (never again), Cream Choc (classic), Papa Oddy’s (homely), Cafe Continga (useful).

I love the home and the life I have built for myself, but will I ever be able to escape that stifling sense of responsibility? Must I needs to travel to find it?

I may be more open to social deception games.

I discovered Daft Punk and had a small meltdown. Random Access Memories is so good? And Shruti has been saying this the whole time it seems, but I haven’t paid attention? Azan made me a whole ass playlist and I didn’t listen to it until now? Serves me right. Also, I might be an elektronika girlie??

Scared a colleague into hydrating when they were drunk. Oh noooo my Indiewebclub personality is leaking into work whatever shall I doooo

Media Diet

lol, as if.

[^1]: These e2e tests are different from evals.

[^2]: This is a completely separate discussion from building products with the help of LLMs for code generation.

[^3]: Thanks, Sohom, for the gift that is Becky Chambers

[^4]: Thanks, Ankur and Calra, for painstakingly translating all the verse in Chaiyya Chaiyya for me!

[Blog] Reminders for Engineers Using LLMs

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Code is cheap

Maybe you should actually rewrite your whole stack if things start breaking. As long as you keep the harnesses for verification (e2e tests, parameterised tests) and the institutional knowledge, you’re fine.

Code reviews are a historic relic

You will have to figure out knowledge disbursal across your engineering org accordingly.

Using LLMs defaults you to the shallows

If you’re not careful, you will get caught up in the how something gets built more than what it is. Engineers already have a tendency to get lost in the details and be myopic. Make time to take a step back and engage with the tech (and product) as its own unit.

Stretch your mind

With llms you are creating so much more surface area. It becomes (even more) important to build your own systems to keep track of it all in your head[^1].

[^1]: Or maybe this is a function of working at a high-intensity product org/start up? I feel the need to be able to talk eloquently about any of the twelve things I've worked on this last week at a micro and macro level at a moment's notice. I am currently bad at this. Advice appreciated.

[Blog] Claude is bad for my hedonist brain

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:14:32 GMT

I’ve been using LLMs to write all my code since July 2025, but the first few weeks of March saw something strange happen. I woke up at about 4am, and I worked until at least 4pm - often 6 or 7pm - taking breaks only for meals (and perhaps a call or two). That’s a VERY large amount of work! And my brain is so tired at the end of it. But... I wanted this.

Yes, I think the nature of software engineering has changed. If you’re managing LLMs who write code for you instead of doing it by hand, you’re playing a very different game with your brain chemistry. You’re no longer spending three hours getting lost in a problem statement and getting into flow; you’re managing 6 different contexts, switching between them in the downtime of the others. You become a manager instead of a creator. You become a slave to making sure the machine has enough to eat.

After using Claude for 6 to 10 hours a day, my brain feels the same way it did in 2018 and 2019, when I was doing Not-Engineering for work, having to manage vendors and customers and research and strategy and following up with about 80 different people and staying on top of the trends so I can capitalise on them in some way. Each conversation checkpoint feels like reaching the end of a long comment thread on an entertaining AskReddit. Each time I come back to the same tab containing a slightly different context the brain signals travel through the same pathways that coming across a *different* short from *Gray’s Anatomy* does.

After a long, hard, day at work, I come home exhausted. I cannot consider socialising with anyone because I am out of words. I take the time to wind down. I feed the cats, do my skin care, water the plants, prep food for tomorrow. I take the cats through playtime, shower, and head to bed... where my brain, after having been on the hamster wheel for ten hours and then having three hours of rest, is ready to go again. It’s horrible. My cortisol is elevated, my attention split, and I feel like I’m always dropping a ball I don’t yet know about.

Three years ago, when I realised how much social media usage was eroding my psychological sovereignty, I was able to simply quit. But I cannot simply quit my job - more importantly, I don’t want to. I enjoy writing code, but only in as much as it is useful to me to get things done. As someone with high agency, LLM-backed code generators have thrown open problem spaces - from things I theoretically know is possible but don’t have the time to do anything about, to things I can actually build, given two days and several million tokens.

The cost of this is that I need to figure out how to protect my brain the way people with social media jobs need to learn to protect theirs.

[Weeknotes] Week of 5th April, 2026

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

7 weeks since a weeknote. Life updates will come at the end. First, this week:

Work

The whole team is (finally!) focusing on the product K and I have been building for the last two months and we’re planning to do a launch. We’re moving to a new codebase and a new paradigm of defining these LLM-first workflows - DAGs, and not state machines, will be a first class citizen here.

We’re doing a two week offsite in Goa (one week down!), and all of us are cooped up in a single villa. We’re getting to know each other really well. Since the move to defining this new product has coincided nicely with our time here, we’ve been doing more conversations than ever.

Engineering teams have always dealt with problems of knowledge silos. When LLMs are doing the work and code reviews are a historic relic, this is even more pressing. The larger problem here is not one of knowledge dispersal, but rather that different folks learn differently (and this *is* fundamentally a learning strategy problem). Some people might prefer to learn by doing a synchronous Friday afternoon call where we all present what we’ve been doing all week, but if I have to attend a call like that I will probably scream. I would prefer if people dropped notes about interesting things from the week, but other people might view it as an unnecessary chore and just produce slop, and still others might simply not read such a document. This feels like it is not a solved problem, but I would appreciate pointers on what people have seen as successes work in their organisations.

Health/Life

Last weekend was the healthiest I’ve been in a while. Goa always does that to me, I thought...until I arrived at the Airbnb on Monday, which was so chock-full of dust mites (not dust, remember) that I had such a horrible stuffed nose and bad throat and headache and the whole works. That’s when I discovered that it’s actually Nats’ home, and not Goa, that had been the antidote I needed all along. Well, now that I have made this discovery, let’s just say that spare bed will be getting a lot more use :)

I have written about perfect Goa days before; last weekend was another such. How do I know when I’m home? When there is a kitchen that is mine. Nats’ condiment drawer puts mine to shame, her fridge gives me life, and I made - casually - about 6 different lovely things over the span of two days.

Goa is also good for movement - I ran 1.5k on Sat, did pickleball for 1ish hour on Tue and Fri, ran a 3k on Wed in no small part thanks to Devanjal, did a bunch of laps in the pool yesterday...

What’s been bad: I feel like I’m not getting enough veggies, I’m *definitely* not eating enough seafood, my ankle isn’t recovering the greatest, the allergies are still very much present, just not as flagrant, and I may be catching a viral.

I sang last night after forever. Of course I did Zombie (The Cranberries), for a crowd. What a magical feeling. But now it’s the next morning and my throat feels worse and more hoarse. One day, when I have more money and time than I do now, I am going to go to a vocal coach and discover that its true! there really is no way to undo the damage I did to my voice all those years ago. But maybe there will be a way to sing with what I have now and have it not hurt as much?

I love fresh Urrak.

I have gotten better at riding the two wheeler. Maybe I’ll give it another go in Bangalore.

I have been missing my car more than I’ve been missing my room. I’ve shared rooms often. My car is mine.

Media Consumption

Reading

I am currently reading

[a] Atmosphere - taylor jenkins ried [a] All eyes on us - a cheating murder mystery that becomes queer somehow I think? [a, k] Come as you are [k] If on a winter's night a traveller [m] A life in trans activism - A Revathi's latest memoir [m] Expansive love - a book on relationahip anarchy [m] SICP [b] A Dalit Kitchen of Marathwada [b] Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh

This list is sorted by platform - [a]udiobook, [m]oon+ reader, [k]indle and physical [b]ook. I'm also reading one physical book on loneliness that's on my coffee table but it's on my coffee table so I almost never have time for it (and also I have forgotten what it's called). Thanks Nats, for foisting the last two physical books on me, with permission to annotate in the margins and the nice pen to do it with!

Listening

The boys at work listen to entirely too much Hindi hip hop. I’m not complaining very loudly, though.

Enjoyed Arima Ederra’s A Rush to Nowhere, Paris Paloma’s Miyazaki (that woman can do no wrong), Arlo Park’s Get Go.

Spent a solid two weeks OBSESSED with Hillary Duff’s luck... or something.

Harry Style’s Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally was alright. It could have been More. It felt like he held back, with the production.

I have not yet made time for the new RAYE album and this fact makes me very sad. The single (and its video) was perfection.

Other life updates you probably care about if you are my friend (or: the back issues)

Recovery from the wisdom tooth recovery was HELL. It’s now been over a month and finally, finally the pain has mostly subsided but I’m still dealing with the issues. I wish I’d known about this better, sooner.
I watched Project Hail Mary and I have Thoughts. You will read them soon.
I really enjoyed meeting my parents for Ugadi, even if I left home early.
I have been playing football at least once a week in Bangalore. It has been great. If you want to play football, TELL ME PLS OMG
The bill passed. My trans siblings can no longer call themselves trans. And I could go to jail for housing them. I moved to this country fifteen odd years ago, thinking that if I could make a difference anywhere, it would be here. At least this place is mine. Now I am not so sure. And what’s the point, anyway? Everyone who I love, if they have the means, will have to move - for their own safety. *I* might have to move, for my own safety. I hate that this is happening.
IndieWebClub is growing so much, I’m so proud. We’ve had two sessions in a row where 30+ people have shown up. I would love to see more Indie Web Clubs happen in other cities. The people want to write independently!
I ate some absolutely fantastic Kashmiri food. That cuisine is one I have no intuition for (yet!). Where should I start reading to understand it?
One Eid Iftar thing was done. Too many haleem was tasted. Tipsy was happened. nice.
Okay, I understand why people like Mitsky now. I will give her body of work another shot. I would like more friends to do listening parties please.
I continue to be attached to home and not very social after work. I don’t feel like it’s strange any more, I *need* this. That’s okay. I love y’all. More next week.

[Blog] On the cost of viewing care as burden

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I made some sub-optimal choices over a weekend in mid March. I was talking to a friend through that weekend, to be an outside observer and keep me sane. The friend held me through it, but later - when it was all over - came over and told me they were mad at me. They used the words “I am mad at you and I am here to yell at you”, which is phrasing we’ve all used in the friend group to indicate tough love. They told me how concerned they were that even though I’m under stressors #1 and #2, I am in denial; how much I’m putting my body through, and how much it can take before I break down. Reader, I did not take it well. I heard what they had to say - they were right, and they were right to say it! - but my brain went to a bad place.

My brain immediately believed that they were only telling me this because they were mad at me - not because of concern (which was true) but because when I fucked up my self-care they would have to come and pick up the pieces. My brain believed they were mad at me because failing to take care of myself meant I was failing them, that I was adding to their workload and their burden.

When children believe that they are responsible for themselves, they turn into well-adjusted individuals. But when they believe they have to be responsible for themselves, they internalise that

They must manage all their problems by themselves at any cost.
When they inevitably don’t, they are a burden.

The cost of failure becomes exclusion from the group. Modern society systematically strips children from the ability to exercise their agency, making them uniquely reliant on the in-group, and so that cost, for children, becomes too high to fathom paying.

I knew that was not what my friend was telling me. I knew (because it had been demonstrated) that my friend did not view me as a burden - did not even view caring for me as a burden. They told me that they’ve watched me show up for them and others time and again, and they always were going to do the same for me. This time, I believed them. Unconditional love is a powerful thing.

[Poetry] Day 0: Harve kaani

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ek badaav ashilo man tu tugel kaani divsa shuru kele aaj megel kaani haav kash baraytasa tu youjalna

Ammi bashil thaiy Chikmangalur bus stand antha, don ghante. ratri. Hoona, galija, cheeda Apnale ghar nashil tena votu lokkal ghar bare dista

haanv tugel bage barainashi ani kasan barou, Shahid?

Haanv basla hanga atta Goyant ek poola laggi. Amgel gaanv kash karn davarla pale amma! Hoona. Galija. Cheeda. Megel ghar asa. Hang nai, jalar thai chan mak sookh ditasa. Thaiche ghar, mak hang bare dista.

[Blog] GloPoWriMo 2026

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Another year, another month of poetry.

Writing last year was lots of effort in my head, and very little once I started. I finally proved to myself that I don’t need to be depressed to write poetry, and to write poetry I’m proud of. (Not that it’s any good! Just that I’m happy :)

This year, I want to write entirely in Konkani. I miss the language, and I think I will never speak it as much as I want to (for lack of people to talk to in it) - but maybe knowing I can write in it (sans a culture of reading, writing, a grammar, or an alphabet) will ease the ache in my heart.

[Blog] Minting Tanvi Bucks

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Follow Sahiti’s excellent rant to me about how incentives work, I have implemented an economy for myself.

The Store

500 Tanvi Bucks gets me an excellent massage from a friend.
200 Tanvi Bucks gets me permission to use 2 hours in the morning to work on something I’m excited about (as opposed to doing work I get paid for)
Essentially, I want to use Tanvi Bucks as tangible proof that yes, I do indeed deserve it.

The Bank

I earn 50 Tanvi Bucks every time I

Sleep, allowing myself 8 hours (if it was likely that I was otherwise going to be up late)
Work less than 8 hours a day (this is a problem, I’m generally at my desk for 9 to 12 and my body HATES it)
Do some other unpleasant tasks - yesterday I earned 50 Tanvi Bucks for responding to ten people I’ve been putting off in the last week (there was some unnecessary shame involved that kept me from doing so immediately)

Smaller, more consistent ways to earn

50 Tanvi Bucks for a blog post
20 Tanvi Bucks for a poetry submission to GloPoWriMo
100 Tanvi Bucks for an SICP exercise

I have some other big number Tanvi Bucks I’m set to earn when I finish larger projects. Admin-type tasks, and Important but not Urgent tasks are a good category to make Tanvi Bucks from!

Given a number, humans are wired to make it go up. I find that I often have the desire to do things, but I’m doing so much that by the end of the day intrinsic motivation alone is not enough to push me. Thus tasks that will generate Tanvi Bucks are by nature prioritised - and I will only assign Tanvi Bucks to tasks that will result in net gains for me but are mildly unpleasant.

Giving myself rewards just doesn’t work

In the past, I’ve tried other external motivators and they have failed in annoying ways.

What kind of reward should I get for what kind of task? There is really nothing that consistently makes me happy that I don’t already have access to (I don't enjoy sweets, or chocolate).
It’s a lot of cognitive effort to come up with a reward that feels satisfying enough to be a driver.
Good rewards should improve the baseline when availed, but not hurt the baseline in its absence. Most times, when I don't get a reward, it feels like a punishment, which was horrible! And that made me much less likely to reach for the rewards mechanism in the first place.
I have agency. If I didn’t do a thing I should have, and as a result I didn’t get a thing I wanted, I got mad! And hurt. And generally felt like a petulant eleven year old. Withholding rewards as punishment is a horrible way to parent (and reminded me too much of the bad sides of my parent), so I would soothe myself by simply accessing the reward. This further weakened the idea of the reward being a thing to aspire to - because I knew I could just get it anyway.

Using currency as a middle layer obfuscates most of these problems. Using the currency to weigh in when I'm indecisive kills two bird with one stone. I hope the way I’ve structured my current economy sidesteps most (or all?) of these problems.

If you want to, you can keep track of my economy here: t.me/tanvibucks

[Blog] Liquid Food Log

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had the two wisdom teeth on my right side taken out on Tuesday. There was a lot of unexpected suffering post-facto, which I’m attempting to document here to save someone else from this poor misery (or myself when I get the left side removed).

The food

Day 0 - ie surgery day

Immediately after the removal I went and got ice cream. This was a problem because

I don’t consume dairy.
I hate ice cream But I went to Lick and had their mango sorbet and found immense relief. I also ordered two boxes of Noto dairy free ice cream (French vanilla, and double chocolate) for home.

Meal 1: Tomato Gazpacho. I owe it entirely to Ankur, who, despite knowing each other for seven years and being best friends for three, cooked for me for the first time ever in the making of this.

Meal 2: milkshake - sweet melons, chikoos, oatmilk.

Day 2

Meal 1: Ragi ganji. (this recipe is a little complex, but for my version you just dissolve the ragi flour in a small amount of water and heat it in a large amount of water to create a slurry. Can be flavoured any way you like, similar to an oatmeal).

Meal 2: Ragi ganji + bottle guard juice

Meal 3: Cold miso soup

200ml water
two eggs (slurry)
1 tsp horse gram paste
half tsp white miso (after adding ice)

Meal 4: A strawberry/banana/oat flour smoothie that Devanjal brought me.

Meal 5: The last bits of ragi ganji.

Day 3

I woke up in so much pain and needed to eat something immediately so I could take my meds.

Meal 1: protein powder + water + ice

Meal 2: banana + strawberry + oatmilk smoothie I made for myself inspired by my friend yesterday.

Meal 3: this is where I hit the jackpot. Food is very important to me, and I vary flavours and textures very often in my everyday meals. Not being able to do so has been such a toll... until I made this soup. I’ve been craving khao suey, so I made a broth flavoured like it.

1tbsp mustard oil, heated
1tsp home ground ginger paste I had in the freezer
1 tsp fuckin onion flakes in had in the fridge
100ml water
several drops of Vietnamese fish oil
1tbsp thai pork stock powder
1 tsp haldi
1/2 tsp pepper
three shakes of Singapore-chinese mushroom stock powder
frickin pav bhaji masala from Zoff (the secret ingredient!)
a slurry of 2 eggs
100ml of coconut milk

It look longer to write out the ingredients list than to make this meal! And it satisfied me so completely. I am so proud of this for myself - that when I have a craving I am able to make it happen for me. Past Tanvi did a good job - learning about flavour profiles, stocking pantry, learning to prioritise her feelings. Making this dish, to me, was a radical act of self-care.

So of course I told three friends about it and invited them over for dinner and made real khao suey for them. Substitutions because vegetarian:

vegetable stock powder instead of pork stock
a little more mustard oil because no sub for the fish oil
added frozen veggies
rice noodles (I don’t stock wheat noodles any more)
and I made toppings, frying onions and scallions

While they ate this dinner, I had Meal 4: Half a banana smoothie that Devanjal got me as thanks for dinner

After this meal and this group hang, I had a second wind - so I ended up working from 11pm to 4am, so I needed another snack (and another painkiller) at 1am.

Meal 5: protein shake

Day 4

Also woke up in lots of pain. No new things today - repeats of ragi ganji, banana smoothie, etc. But there were other highlights.

I ate a semi-smushed food! I ate some plain cold oatmeal with (you guessed it) oatmilk. I ate about 1/4th of a cup and mostly smushed it against my palate instead of chewing, but it provided a very necessary boost to my confidence.

Day 5 (the day I published this)

I visited the dentist again today and was encouraged gently to start introducing semi-solid foodsback into my diet. So I'm thinking of doing this via idly dip, overcooked noodles, and more oatmeal. I think I'm still going to avoid anything with hard bits or crunchy small pieces for another week or so. I drank my ragi ganji at room temp and not ice cold today. Baby steps.

The recovery

I was told I could start eating warm and semi-solid food post 24h after the procedure, but I was in too much pain and discomfort to be able to trust that. I’m glad I took it slow. I also iced the side of my face for about 36 hours post procedure, but I don’t know how much good it did me.

Because I was entirely on liquid food, it was much easier to take care of my mouth and the sutures. I didn’t actually brush for the first three days - I could barely open my jaw enough - but I did use a medicated mouth wash on days one, three, and four which helped with making me feel better about infection possibility.

Other things:

I made sure to add huge blocks of ice to every drink.
Nothing I ate had any kind of chilli/hot spice in them.
Because I was eating such light food, I didn’t need the Pan D even though I was on very strong antibiotics.

Shout out once again to Past Tanvi who indulged in a then-partner’s desire to drink lots of ice water and bought this set of silicone trays for large ice cubes. I probably went through 36-40 cubes over the course of those four days. I also have never drank this much ice water in my life (I don’t like the cold! I carry a flask around everywhere! I have a sensitive throat.)

Before the procedure, I didn’t realise how much pain I would be in and therefore completely failed to plan for most of it. Luckily, Ankur and Calra really came through on Day 0 and work was flexible enough to allow for wfh and strange sleep schedules (one of the pain meds made me really drowsy). But this whole experience really made me realise how self-reliant I can be, and how good the systems I've built for my life are. I've always been fairly independent but I've really craved nurturing and care when I'm sick (like most people) - maybe next time I will feel better about taking care of myself. It's also worth thinking about which of these systems are a function of living at home and which of these I can replicate when I'm travelling - for when I spend more time on the road and invariably catch a fever or two.

I do have to get the left side set of teeth removed but I think it’s going to be a while before I schedule it...

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 14th, 2026

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Health

My voice felt better, but my body was clearly still fighting something off. I felt lethargic and annoyed. I spent three separate days rotting, which is a lot, and goes way beyond my once-a-month quota. Something wasn’t right in my brain, but I’ve since figured it out and am taking care of it.

I did start being more physically active.

1.5km run on Wednesday
Twenty minutes of stretching on Thursday
1hour of football on Friday evening

Life

Saturday was Valentine’s day, which I spent by having an extremely mediocre breakfast at Backer&Charlie, working with some friends in the afternoon, watching Wuthering Heights in the evening, and making/having dinner with more friends at night.

I was unexpectedly sad for most of the day. Historically I haven’t cared about the day too much but my last primary partner cared a lot, and it felt so strange not letting myself get caught up in the capitalist frenzy that this “holiday” becomes. There is something to be said about the comfort and ease of following a LifeScript as a stand-in for romance. But this year, instead of spending the day with a primary partner, I met six - SIX! - different friends and had such a good time. Not a party, but six different people who embody some version of home is a good day.

Media Diet

Reading

I was going to read WhatMurdah’s Bloody, Slutty and Pathetic for the THIRD time before I decided it was enough, and asked on groups for similar fic that has excellent character development and political manoeuvring. I was given a few but none seemed appealing until Sahiti proposed a fix trade - they would read BSP if I read a fic of their choosing. Since I mostly wanted to spread the good gospel and to squeal about the fic myself, I agreed. Now I am reading a rewrite of the series and am wondering what I have gotten myself into.

Watching

I watched Wuthering Heights in the theatre and wrote about my thoughts.

Listening

Mad at everyone that a random running music playlist creator has given me more rock made by women than any person or algorithm has in the last 5 years. Listened to and really enjoyed

We are the Fallen
Sharon van Etten
Epica

[Blog] Review: Wuthering Heights

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is a very 2026 movie
Was it a bad movie? Yes. Did I enjoy myself? Yes.
If you’ve read the book, you should simply forget that you’ve read the book and watch the movie. They closely follow similar plot points... but this could also be a movie adaptation of the princess bride.
This movie is high production value bad Dramione fan fiction.
This is exactly the kind of movie I expect people to make in 2026. This is the kind of movie people are going to take screengrabs of with captions on and tag themselves. This is the kind of movie that people are going to shorten into 180seconds to monetise their shitty YouTube-shorts-driven channels. This is the kind of movie that exists for people to write about, not for the art of it at all. This is fine.
Give the person in charge of visuals a raise. Starting from the typeface (which is why I went to watch the movie in the first place), all the colors were so saturated. Rich. Evocative.
Give the post-production person a paycut please. I don’t actually know if AI was used it to finishing of this movie, but it felt like it. Some backgrounds were too smooth, others didn’t make visual sense.
It feels like Jacob Elordi has been typecast into playing only Nate-like roles. I’m not complaining, I think? Bad Boys are certain one of the boys of all time.
I don’t get some of the plot. I don’t get it. Why do we start by showing the public hanging? Why do we focus on the dead man’s stiffy? Why is a lady shaking her bosom at him? Why do we never revisit any of this again? Why does Isabella allow herself to participate in the sexual depravity that Heathcliff puts her through (especially in the context of the times)?
The violence feels gratuitous and uncouth. It’s just plain uncomfortable. The scene with the slaughter of the dead pig, all the jellied things. Ugh.
The costumes are gorgeous. The set design is breath-taking. The moors are so lovely.
Charli did a decent job with the soundtrack, but she could have put the effort in to a different album-long music video and it would have been less forgettable. This is classic Charli. Every time she flips, she immediately has to flop.
At 150ish minutes of runtime, this is not something I will watch again. I don’t even expect to think about this movie again. But I suspect the visuals will come back to me when I least expect it.
I gave up 20% of the way through reading this book when I was very young. It felt too tedious. Now I’m going to have to pick it up again, even if the book has nothing to do with the movie, just because of the visuals it has left me with.
I can’t wait to read some obscure piece of literature 15 years from now that is going to reference wallpaper containing a birthmark from the left cheek.

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 8th, 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:30:00 GMT

Work

The three days I did spend this week on work were very interesting, because at some point I gave up on feature/product work and focused on RICEing my setup. This felt good, and like selfcare, and will also compound into efficiency improvements. Primarily, I moved to Ghostty and Zed. I’ve been using Claude to help me set up Ghostty settings (because there doesn’t seem to be a way to discover them outside of the docs?) and it’s been much more satisfying (and faster) than standard RICEing.

I also finally moved beyond the the web app for the prescreen product we built - I looked into Garak, and working with letta memories some more, and post-merge testing.

Life

Aah, the coast. Being away from Bangalore home is excellent when it works, but I haven’t yet figured out my schedules and forcing functions for when it doesn’t work. Ways it doesn’t work:

low excitement about some work thing that means I don’t get it done (as opposed to in Bangalore I would go to a friend’s or something to do it)
no clear routines on sleeping/waking so I spend much longer in the transition period for both But I’m excited about this! It means I rely on myself more.

Goa makes it much easier to exercise. Since it’s hot, it feels better on my joints and I wake up feeling more refreshed. And since there’s always a beach nearby, I can run without causing my knee undue pain.

I took the train to Udupi which picked me up two hours late. Why is even the Rajdhani delayed? I am so mad that this government of the last ten years has somehow managed to make the system worse than it was in 2015 (when I was regularly taking trains).

So Wednesday and Thursday I was in Udupi for a friend’s wedding. I was tired for most of it because I was battling a sore throat, but I still danced, socialised, and even gave a toast to the home my friend had provided for me when I was 17 and desperately in need of one. I discovered that one of her (new) husband’s childhood friends lives 350m from my house (!) so on Friday morning when the sore throat had devolved into full blown laryngitis, we immediately booked flight tickets and flew straight home. I would like to run on Kaup beach and visit the lighthouse another day.

Then I was sick and on voice rest for three days. In 2024 I had acute laryngitis 4 times, and was on voice rest for a cumulative total of 6 weeks. Six weeks without talking! During that time I learnt some ISL, but the person I was living with made no effort to learn it so it was useless (and disheartening). Now I’ve lost most of the signs, but I taught a few to some people, and that was fun.

The weekend ended with a session of IndieWebClub, which was super fun. I felt like almost everyone contributed to the discussion, which is rare.

The last three days I’ve been back in Bangalore I’ve been sick yes but also feeling pretty antisocial. I love my friends and I feel an obligation to them (which is fine) but right now I feel like being selfish. I want to indulge only myself, and the idea of being beholden to anyone or anything else is simply too much.

Big win for the week was that I cut what clothes I want to pack for my travel in half and I actually ended up wearing an even smaller subset of it, so I have more data on packing light (especially if I have access to a washing machine and a warm climate).

Health

I did two runs and a stretch this week! I didn’t track anything about my first run. My second run was 2.2km at a 6.9 pace - I could possibly have gone longer but a rando on the beach challenged me to a sprint at the end and I couldn’t say no! I’ve been putting off figuring out what my ideal bpm is, because I didn’t want to deal with the headache, but at the 6.9 pace which seems natural to me, turns out I’m at a 160bpm which also translates to 160 steps a minute (which means that my stride length is 90cm haha). Experimenting with some rock-heavy playlists, let’s see how that goes now that I’m back in Bangalore.

The Laryngitis was painful. I’ve added a section for it in my care document.

Learning

How can I record/share vocabulary lists? Are they even useful for language learning? I’m guessing no, except as a memory aid for repetition.

Media Diet

Reading

Started The Spear Cuts Through Water. There are two parts of the book and they're both set in a war zone. We live in horrible times and there is strife and injustice everywhere that I work very hard to keep out of my life so I can actually live in it. Reading about it does the opposite, it tugs at my heartstrings too much. For me, reading is for pleasure so I need to be able to stop at any point and not feel a pit in my stomach. Essentially, the book brought up the same feelings I had around The Traitor Baru Cormorant, so I’ve DNFed this one too. That being said, the audiobook version of this is truly excellent.

Also started A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Calm and interesting premise perfect for goa, so when I go back I’ll probably stick to that.

I did restart, and finish Bloody, Slutty, and Pathetic (AO3). Man, I am so done with romances where things are easy, and the MCs get together just because. I want the MCs to fight! I want them to hate each other!! I need to see character growth in fiction to remind myself that it is possible to expect it from real people. A good enemies-to-lovers does that so well. Some choice quotes from the book:

Draco favored Higgs with his smuggest expression. “I’m not the kind of man who feels the need to order his witch around like a house elf,” he drawled. “Tell me, Higgs, is it want of resources or lack of stamina that has you begging off from satisfying your women’s whims? My mother wants me to wear green to her Yule ball, I wear green. My wife wants underprivileged workers to have rights—” He waved his hand dismissively. “I indulge her. It’s no effort for me to do these little things to make her happy.” A derisive chuckle. “After all, I’m merely talking to you.”

The context here is that Draco is continuing to pretend like he has pureblood (ie, bigoted) sympathies so that he can infiltrate (and eventually, betray) their circles; but in the process he checks this one’s misogyny so thoroughly. The charecter equivalent of “why don’t people please their wives? Like it’s hard?”

And another:

He made his selection and kicked his shoes off onto the rug, putting his feet on the coffee table as he sat back. “Malfoy,” she said, “that’s a muggle romance novel.” He looked over at her, an eyebrow raised. “And you think I am sufficiently romantic? I require no further instruction?” Hermione opened and closed her mouth. “Have at it,” she said finally.

I think a big green flag if you’re looking to date is reading romance novels. Just like engineers need to read speculative fiction to hone and develop their imagination, people who plan to love need to read romance literature to understand what it means to grow with another person.

Watching

Staying with Dee and Saket means that we have to watch something together. Alas, high school musical could not happen so we watched two episodes of Derry Girls instead.

I started watching Pose! I’ve watched half the pilot so far, and I really enjoyed it. Maybe this is the show I’ll watch over the course of this year, in ten-minute increments.

Listening

Listening to lots of Lolla favs primarily- yungblud, kehlani, Linkin park.

[Weeknotes] Week of Feb 1st, 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:40:03 GMT

Life

I spent last weekend at Lollapalooza, and I wrote about the experience.

I spent Monday in Bombay doing some much needed shopping, and then took the train overnight to Goa, where I’ve spent the last few days imposing on Deepti’s lovely home and hospitality, and overcoming my fear of dogs via proximity to Ira, the ~~puppy Dee has just adopted~~ smartest bestest puppy in the world!

Goa has changed so much. Most shocking to me has been the outsider sentiment. As early as 5 years ago, when I lived here, I was unable to speak Konkani to anyone because I speak only one of the eight possible Konkanis - and the one I speak is wrong for the region. This time, people were so glad to hear some konkani - any konkani! - that they actively engaged with me, responded with a smile, and made an effort to understand me. Many words have been written about who is allowed to call themselves Goan. I don’t call myself Goan because I’m not, but I am coastal. I so rarely get to speak my language, so I will take the crumbs I am offered.

I have changed so much in the years I have been coming to Goa. Here, in the past I have been

A penitent
A run away
A shut in
A party girl
Adopted by community that is not mine
Gay as hell

Today, I am tired. I was tired before Lolla, I have been tired since September, and I knew I would want to go home immediately after. So here I am, home in weather/clothes/eyes/food/loves. Today, I am tired but I am resting. I still spend ten hours a day working, but when I am done the empty trails and chirping birds greet me. I walked a dog and made small talk with the neighbours, and with the strangers at the tiny places I took myself to. I woke up with a headache for two days straight, and then Dee gave me a massage, I did my stretches, I basked in the sun, and I healed.

I ~~published~~wrote four posts in three days! I am finishing what I started. After work, when I’m tired, I can actually pause and breathe instead of thinking about the next thing I need to do. I miss my friends when I’m eating a thali by myself, but not enough to go back. I can hear myself think after 5 months of just trudging forward. I think I’m going to spend the rest of this month here - accommodation, transportation, and cat care willing.

I have eaten strawberries and dipped myself in clean salt water. I ran into an old friend of an old friend and we were surprisingly vulnerable with each other. I have taken myself out to write these notes, and to work. I am so content.

Health

This week, I had TWO bad headache days. They’ve become regular again :( But when it was happening, Dee was able to suggest helpful things because I told her to open my care page. That page is WIP, but did the job when it was needed!

Media Diet

No media. I’m just doing my crosswords, reading my rss feeds, and old fanfiction.

Work

So much has changed about how I work in the last six months.

I’m a full time employee instead of an independent contractor.
I’m working closely with a team instead of building things by myself.
I’m doing everything engineering instead of building design systems.
I’m exclusively using LLMs to write code instead of writing any by hand myself.

The consequences:

I’m tired.
I’m having so much fun - I’m learning something massively new (to me) every week. I don’t even have the time to write about it all.
I’m growing as an engineer - and not just technically. How I hold and handle context, how I prioritise product, how I work with people has all changed (for the better).
The minutia of work has taken over all my spare thoughts.

The last one is a problem because in a world where the efficiency of my workflow dictates how much work I produce, any changes I make to my processes will give me an outsized return in the work I do in the next week! The bottlenecks of traditional work are ten times more likely to hurt me because I’m ten times more likely to encounter them. But I haven’t had the chance to sit down and evaluate what I need to do at a meta level to improve those processes because I haven’t felt like I have the time. My hope is that I can use this break in Goa to better my internal workflows - for computer and brain both.

With Claude, it’s easy to just build features, but do that enough and the codebase starts feeling like a heap of barnacles all piled on top of each other, with no thought to design. That is okay to get to production, but is a maintenance nightmare. Can Claude help me tease apart everything that’s going on and re-architect this better?

I’m afraid of doing any kind of rewrite or major feature upgrades because I’m not actually confident in the integrity of the codebase. Yes we have e2e tests but are they good? Are they enough? I am afraid of making changes to this codebase. What do I need to feel better about it?

Claude has been great for me because I have realised that I operate with most things tech from a place of fear. Claude helps get over the starting problem, but it also helps me absolve responsibility (to myself) - I didn’t break it, Claude did! But because I know what’s broken, I can now fix it. Working in a codebase with Claude feels like using a large clawstick to understand the codebase. It’s just too far removed to give me any meaningful texture that I can hook my understanding upon. How can I then build in exploration of the codebase as it is into my reflective process?

[Blog] Lollapalooza 2026

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the 4th edition of Lollapalooza India, and the 4th time I’m attending it.

Things that will stay the same (aka festival advice from me who has attended ~7 music festivals now):

Never take the metro. And DEFINITELY never take a cab/car. The local trains are brilliant, and you should take it (first class is your friend, as is going early when the crowds are less).
If you’re doing the festival right, you will end up walking at least 20k steps. So it’s okay to walk from the local to the station, budget in two kilometres a piece for the entrance and the exit. Most people walking with you will also be going to the festival, so you will have fun!
Stay hydrated. Take a clear bottle inside, or buy one for Rs. 100/- as a momento of the festival.
The alcohol is NOT worth it. The long lines, it is dehydrating, and costs 1k for a decent cocktail? No thanks.
Skipping the drinks also means you spend little to no time in the lines to the loo.
Festivals, to me, are a place of music discovery. So I will always go at 2pm and I will always attend as many artists as possible. Open your mind, and you might be surprised.

This edition was surprisingly rock/metal heavy - generally Lollapalooza tries to be a little more genre-inclusive. This edition also hit my personal preference of having acts that are fronted by women, so I had a particularly good time in terms of music discovery.

Day 1

Zoya

BRILLIANT indie alt pop vibes. Indian girls can make pop music!!!! The performance was a vibe and a half. Reminiscent of Kayan from a few years ago. Def listening to the new album.

Hot milk

Very rock metal, we only heard the last ten minutes. Fronted by a woman, so they’re going on my playlist.

Mother mother

Alt/rock/folk, TWO front women (and a frontman). We stayed for the first thirty minutes of their set, which included a song that started with the lyrics

I wear women's underwear
And then I go to strike a pose in my full-length mirror
I cross my legs just like a queer
But my libido is strong when a lady is near, yeah
What defines a straight man's straight?
Is it the boxer in the brief or a twelve-ounce steak? Nah
I'll tell you what a woman loves most
It's a man you can slap but can also stroke

Um, HELL yes. They’ve been around for twenty years (!) but seem to be especially popular gen-z music (whatever that means). They’re a little too folksy to be on my regular rotation but I can see that I’m going to have to pick out a few pieces to go in there. Their energy on stage was chill and fun, perfect for the 4pm slot, getting us ready for the rest of the festival.

Fujii Kaze

From the homework I’d done for the festival, I was looking forward to his performance. His album felt like pop from the mid 2015s, which is not far enough away from us that we’re nostalgic for it (yet). He is a very good looking man, but his movements felt like he was still learning them, like they didn't come naturally. I was expecting him to come with backup dancers like Eric Nam from Lolla India 2024 - it definitely felt like the performance was choreographed that way. Nonetheless, he put on such a show! The crowd contained a large number of people from the Japanese diaspora living in India, which was really nice to see. It looked like they had mostly come to see him!

Men from SEA are often mocked (especially in India and other locales with a prominent chauvinistic masculinity) for being effeminate. Fujii took that one step further - the man is NOT afraid of his hip gyrations. This was not appreciated by the set of young 20somethings next to me - they said some pretty homophobic stuff and walked away. I’m glad they told on themselves - more space for me! This didn’t seem matter to the crowd at large, they were charmed and here to enjoy themselves. The crowd for Fujii Kaze was already pretty strong - maybe 30k? I was suprised by how much of the crowd sang along with every word of his set!

Ken Carson, Destroy Lonely, Homixide Gang

They were opening for Playboi Carti on the main stage because they're his labelmates. We didn’t listen to them, because a friend and I had decided to stay on to try and get to the front for the next act, but in the silence between sets we heard some incredible energy and the kind of hip hop I would have enjoyed live. I probably won’t listen to them again but I would like to catch them live.

Yungblud

I decided to prioritise his set purely on the basis of watching his grammy nominated performance of Changes where he played with Nuno Bettencourt of Extreme fame.

Extreme headlined for Bandland in Nov 2024, and is quite possibly the best live performance I have ever seen. They are a very classic rock band. I spent ages 15 to 19 listening to classic rock (I was in my pick-me era). I have since learnt about my own tastes, and don’t waste my time listening to rock, but I do catch it live where I can. There is something about the magical combination of electric guitar, bass guitar, and a classic drum kit that can just take over my body and let me forget myself. Extreme is not the classic rock that the boys I hoped would pick me embodied - they’re the kind of classic rock that pushed the boundaries of genre. They grew long hair, wore make up and sequins. They danced about on stage. They were earnest about the music they wrote and created. They were (I am told) the antidote to the rigid masculinity I’ve grown up with and associated with rock. Also, they’re hot, and they know it. The way rockstars play with their audience is a sight to behold. There is a banter in it that I can’t help but me charmed by, even as I know what is happening.

Yungblud is such a rockstar, except he’s from MY generation. For two straight hours, the man’s energy propelled what grew to be 70,000 people (!!) to sing, scream, and sway with him. One man’s energy pushed us to forget everything except the body we inhabited, the people around us, and the music. Did Yungblud get his start as a cover artist? I’m not familiar as to how he can perform songs that don’t belong to him (what his belonging in music, really?) but his traditional setlist seems to contain a bunch of classic rock songs (fleabag, changes, I was made for loving you) that is designed to endear him to any crowd and showcase his chops as a pure performer. On social media, Yungblud feels authentic, charming, hard working, and embodies a lot of the values rockstars should[1].

I knew from Olivia Rodrigo and Aly & Aj that I could enjoy rock on its own merits. I know from Yungblud that there’s some ways to go before I will let rock die.

Day 2

Honestly Day 2 was fine. Yes I had fun, but after the high (and tiredness) of yungblud I think I just made it through the day and enjoyed myself nominally. I'll fill up this section if I ever feel the need to revisit this day.

Zokova
Callum Scott
The burgers at that stall
Bloodywood
Kehlani
Linkin Park

Outside lollapalooza

Haleem and chai at Good Luck Cafe
Breakfast at the versova place
Breakfast at Bombay Journal
Dinner at Eddy’s Breakfast at Cafe Irani Chai

Bombay through the ages

The very first time I came to Bombay in any meaningful way was also for the very first Lollapalooza. Since then, I’ve been here in Bombay seven or eight times, all with Anu. It was very hard doing this festival, and this city, without the person whose context I know it most in. I didn’t stay in Bandra this time (and I regretted it) - but in some ways, I was glad to be staying elsewhere because I wasn’t confronted with the memories that every single sidewalk held for me. I did finish the festival and enjoyed myself, and now I can go back to Bandra. Shout out to Shruti, the OG Bambai girlie whom I called at least forty times over the course of those four days, who made sure I didn’t have to think one whit about meals and transportation, and reminded me that Bombay doesn’t stay in the past. I grow and the city has space for me and all the rest of the life I have to live.

[^1]: What those values are is a discussion for another time.

[Blog] Update on my llm usage patterns (Jan 2026)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Since my last update, I’ve gone all-in on git worktrees.

I typically have between 2 to 4 tabs running, one for each worktree. Each tab will have between two to four “sections” running - one plain terminal for commands (I really dislike using the ! thing in Claude because I can't seem to view the complete output), one with Claude for the primary issue of this worktree, perhaps one secondary Claude thing going with me trying to understand how some part of the codebase is implemented or doing a different exploration path of the solution myself. On the base worktree (which mostly points to main) I'll sometimes have a fourth pane doing some larger exploration/some update to the dev experience/some update to the ci etc, but the moment it becomes a change I want to keep an issue gets created and I branch + worktree.

I also have a few instances of Webstorm open, one for each worktree. This (paid) plugin to add worktree switching support has been invaluable, but given how llms forefront worktree-based workflows I think this feature should go Webstorm’s base offering soon. I use the IDE to review changesets, make minor changes, and to store the scratch files... but that’s about it. I definitely don’t rely on it as much as I used to. Colleagues have gone entire days without needing to open an IDE. I’ve had to leave my beloved Github Desktop behind because while I love the intuitive and simple interface, there is simply no easy way to make it work with worktrees.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of how I use worktrees to tackle issues of different sizes.

the small stuff

Spec out a small feature/bug on linear.
Create a worktree using the linear branch name. Since we work with in a monorepo with microservices, we have a custom script that clones the existing directory, and then copies the .env including a port offset, and the .claude folder. We do fresh installs of pnpm for every worktree but we use the same docker volumes and databases to reduce resources needed.
The llm already has most of the context it needs from the issue, pulled out via the linear cli. It knows to use Explore to figure out the relevant parts of the codebase. We have solid Claude.mds and READMEs for our services that the llm knows to use to jump off of.
The llm does the fix. I run claude in yolo mode, most permissions turned on via .claude.settings.json . If it's a UI change, in my initial prompt I ask the llm to take a screenshot of the result via the playwright mcp, and I just check that result before the commit. If it's any kind of backend/api change, I get the llm to use a tdd skill during the implementation. Both of these things get defined in the initial prompt.
~~Review~~, manually tweak/confirm/test, commit + push + merge + deploy (I have a skill called /end that does the last bits automatically and just alerts me if something reds on the ci)

Scope for improvement

At work on a different project we're using beads, which is a cli-first task management tool that claude can use instead of its internal todo list. You can essentially run an agent to automatically pick up and do a lot of the manual stuff I'm doing around deciding to work on a task, creating a worktree etc. I don’t know if I want to go even faster, but it’s certainly an option!

the big stuff

Lay out the barebones with claude. I'm NOT using planning mode. I want it to go explore the codebase, find relevant files etc, and present a high level overview of what we're doing. I might even ask it to explain the problem statement to me/reframe the problem statement so that I can make sure all the initial constraints I have are represented.
Then I'll tweak the problem statement/the general problem area, sometimes with 2 or 3 back-and-forths until I'm happy with the way the question/task is framed at all[^1].
THEN I open a new claude code thread, paste in the refined high level problem statement, and use a brainstorm skill I have to actually think through all of the large implementation details. This is where most of my time goes. I can spend 4 to 6 hours on this step. This brainstorm skill essentially does the work of defining the specifics of the implementation, covering all primary surface areas. The skill tries to be comprehensive and is reasonable, but it heavily relies on the prompt to understand where to go deep. I will sometimes introduce new considerations for it to "think" about, or look up the stuff it's suggesting myself. This step also spawns a few claude on the web sessions in learning mode where I'm trying to conceptually understand something, and some tabs where I’m reading the docs myself to confirm the statements Claude is making.
The brainstorm skill works by proposing a series of decisions, thinking through a few possible paths, and recording that path. When I'm happy with the majority of the decisions I’ve made, the LLM writes it all out in a document in docs/plan/epic-name/YYYY-MM-DD-feature-name-design-document. This is the design doc.
If the task is gnarly enough, I get a writing plans skill to actually do the work of figuring out the implementation. The skill breaks down the proposed solution into very granular phases, and tasks. It finds the relevant files to change, the line numbers to change, the types to add, the functions to call. I only cursorily review the output of this skill/subagent. This work gets written into a much large implementation details document.
Sometimes I'll get a code review agent to go over the plan. Depending on how complex the task is, I might ask it to go over the design decision document before accepting it, or the implementation details document. With the latter, the skill almost always catch functions that have been hallucinated, some esoteric but obvious bug in the implementation details, some security concern etc. The relevant file is updated with these observations.
Then I'll kill the last claude thread and open a new thread, just telling the llm to implement the file we’ve created using the senior software engineer subagent with the tdd skill, spawning them to run in parallel. Then the LLM does its thing! This can take a while. Sometimes it will ping me 1/3rd of the way through to do a manual check of how things are going, but mostly I just let it runbe. The subagents know to commit after they finishes each task.
When it's all done, I get the code review agent to also look at the implementation. It catches some more things, but they'll often be irrelevant or over-engineering.
Then I'll do a manual test, and discover some extremely dumb thing missing - some flavour of the LLM implementing all the individual parts but forgetting to wire it together, etc, so I'll describe the issue and let the main agent fix it. I’ll do a few more manual tests for interactions with existing features that I didn’t talk about during the implementation. There will almost always be three obvious things to take care of. They will go in my scratch file or in new threads to fix immediately.
Then I create the PR, wait for nobody to review my PR for two days, and merge it in!

Scope for improvement

I feel like I could be defining much better tests but I don't understand enough about how to do that yet, soon inshallah. I want to go through the learn tests with book but I’ve also been saying that for a bit now.
Ideally I also define the e2e playwright test in the design doc stage so that the llm can do it itself, but right now we have auth that doesn’t work with worktrees that blocks it, and I know I'll need to build some scaffolding to handle it that I don't have the time for rn.
Personally, I don't remember streets that I don't walk on - even if I've (been) driven around them many times. Similarly, I've noticed that details and context for the things I've worked on using the llm flow slip away from me much faster week-on-week than it used to. There are several possible reasons - I am working on a much larger surface area, I’m simply working on more issues than I normally would, I'm not having to figure out how the internals of something are to be able to use it - but it's still an issue. I'm going to have to figure out how to do a big-picture review and small-picture review for myself - or figure out other ways to revisit small systems within my codebase.

More general notes

I think skills were the game changer for me. They're essentially just markdown files with some frontmatter that contain all those "You are a Senior Software Engineer" prompts we used to keep around in the clipboard from a few months ago.

I know a lot of people use workflows, which are essentially more invokable versions of my ten-step program from above. A workflow allows one to attach a type of subagent and a type of skill to every task, and is often used to set claude loose on the codebase overnight. At work a colleague uses them extensively but they're a little to out of control for me right now - or maybe I'm not confident enough in my ability to spec a problem out well enough without oversight :)

More general improvements I want to make

I feel like I need to move to ghostty because I hear it's much better with the flicker issues than iterm is. But claude has gotten a lot better about that in the recent updates, from what I can see. I don’t know what iterm features I’m locked into (probably just keyboard shortcuts?) but I’m loathe to make too many changes to my workflows as is.

I feel like I also need to move to Zed over Webstorm because, unfortunately, Webstorm just takes up too much RAM, and I can’t justify the cost (of losing memory). I really don’t want to do this though. Most other IDEs are horrible at implementing JetBrains shortcuts and no, I don’t want to learn ~~VS Code~~ ~~Sublime Text~~ ~~TextMate~~ keybindings. I also fundamentally have a problem with an editor that prioritises putting me in an audio channel with every other current user of their product over letting me talk to the robot the editor was built around.

Addendum

I was recently made aware of skills.sh which is a good place to start exploring available skills. Right now the leaderboards are full of the anthropic base skills + obra's superpowers, but it will be good to keep an eye on this over the next few months.

[^1]: I’m almost always working with a scratch file here, with a todo section and a list of problem spaces I am not yet ready to tackle but need to make a note of.

[Weeknotes] Week of Jan 23rd, 2026

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Woah! I knew I’d skipped two weeknotes but I didn’t realise my last one was from last year. Yes, I was dying and it was a cause for alarm, but the chaos was planned for (as much as one is able to, really) and I... well, I survived.

Work

The big thing at work is that we released prescreen.alt.inc! It’s an interactive, hard screener for people applying to full stack roles with us - hyper specific, but the experiment was primarily around figuring out how we can get an LLM to be stern, bossy, and sound like a real person. For the launch, apart from writing front end code stitching our agents on letta and our agent service together, I

learnt about working with pixel art, and prompted various robots of various kinds to create it for me (a surprisingly involved process! Blog post coming soon.)
visually designed the interface - colors, fonts, spacing, placement.

The process of getting here was stressful. For a month leading up to launch date we prepared for a showcase demo, and then on the Wednesday before the launch date (when I’d already been working ten to twelve hour days for a week) the decision was made to do a private beta kind of launch instead... which meant we had to think about a mobile interface and a freeform agent experience post-screening - both large features in their own rights. To say that weekend was hard would be understating it. Jan 2nd to 12th was crunch, but instead of crashing after launch day (like I had expected to) the momentum carried me through that whole week... and then I crashed this week instead.

Health

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I worked myself into a flare, rather than the flare showing up and then affecting how I work. Somehow I made it through the flare? But now it’s the week after launch, and my body is taking revenge. I am so sleepy and tired all the time, and the knots are BAD, friends. There is only so much a tennis ball can do.

I have

Gone to the immunologist, because my reactions to the cats have only gotten worse. Blessed to have Dr Meghna, who is willing to work with me and my inability to stick to any kind of twice-a-day routine instead of giving up on me. But that did mean 3ish hours of driving in the sun, which rewarded me with a headache for the rest of the day.
Napped because cramps were bad.
Ate so poorly during crunch because I NEEDED SOME JOY OKAY. And now my body feels bloated and ick. I am actually looking forward to starting GF/DF again. Who am I? I am a tired girl with an unhappy body, willing to throw things at the wall to see what sticks.
Been seeing my therapist much more regularly. The last eight months involved lots of change and upheaval in my life but I did great! And I got an A in therapy! So now I’ve been moved to the advanced track where we’re talking about my childhood, my core values, and why I am the way I am. It’s hard work!!! So good but it takes a lot out of me. I’ve been having to schedule recovery time after sessions again.

Life

In this period of intense strife, what’s been keeping me sane? Other people, and having things to look forward to.

Azan emotionally blackmailed me into doing a social thing for new year’s eve. It was a long drive, so obviously I kidnapped Ankur, but I got a brilliant black sesame chicken out of it.

The girlypops did a fantastic drunk dinner at Dolphins, and I discovered that I might like having a neighbourhood bar I go to, and that I enjoy ginger in my cocktails.

I did one (1) session of football which was too little! I need to get running again, bad knee be damned. Desperately looking for groups in central Bangalore who will take a bad but enthusiastic player into their regular rotation.

Makar Sankranti was excellent. The carrom board I gifted dad earlier has become a regular fixture at any events happening at home.

Shruti has been working from my office - and more importantly, she’s been driving me to and from work, and keeping me hydrated and focused in the space. Offices are nice, but if you can? Work in physical spaces with the people you love.

The parents have been staying at mine the last few days. It’s meant that I have had to do a little more caregiving than I usually would, but I think it’s paid of. The goal was to show mum that I’m not alone, and that I won’t ever be alone in my everyday life (she would know that if she read this blog but it’s probably a good thing that she doesn’t haha). I gave friends a heads up that mom would be here, but otherwise didn’t change plans in any way - people came over and coworked, we had meals and gossiped and made impromptu plans, I went out for the things I was scheduled for and came back late, I did all my phone calls to catch up... I think mum finally understands what I mean when I say I have community. She says she trusts that I can take care of myself, but I hope she can now trust that I can find peace and joy in the doing.

All of my community in the last few years has hedged on physical presence. The few friends I have that I /don’t/ hang out with at least once a month I have because they put in the effort to text me or engage with me online. I’m not going to blame this on no social media any more - yes, it helps, but a lot of the friends I want to talk to more aren’t on social media (or aren’t on it in a vulnerable way) anyway. I want to believe that time out of touch doesn’t nullify the depth of a friendship, it doesn’t mean we’ve grown apart... but as people change, the growth apart is only natural. I’ve tried putting recurring tasks on my todo list to call X, Y, and Z, but that makes the relationship feel like a chore! How can I build lasting relationships with people I don’t see (and therefore don’t think about because my brain works this way)?

Media Diet

Reading

I thought I’d read a lot in the last three weeks but turns out it was only one whole book?? I am very confused.

Read The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - started with the audiobook, and finished with the text. I honestly enjoyed the audiobook a lot more, but I needed to tear through it somewhere around the 50% mark. This felt like a book written for Very Mature twelve year olds. I initially disliked it but as the pacing picked up, so did my interest in the shenanigans. I will be reading the next instalment. This book has also made me want to rewatch Life of Pi.

Listening

I’ve been mostly listening to albums, and then listening to autogenerated playlists containing various tracks from those albums.

Nessa Barrett’s AFTERCARE: sad dance pop and excellent for the evenings. Fuji Kaze’s HELP EVER HURT NEVER: jpop that feels like pop. A clean sound that reminds me of 2007. The Kid LAROI’s Before I forget

A friend introduced me to The Favors, and I’ll probably add them to the rotational playlist but not care about the album too much.

I continue to listen to a LOT of all the pop and alt girlies - Lola young, Aubrey Hobert, Olivia Dean, RAYE, etc

[Blog] What do you want from your website in ten years?

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Henrik Henrission has this celebrated essay: A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

(At the time of posting, this was one of an infinite number of tabs languishing half read in my phone browser. I’m not referring to the contents of the blog, but rather responding to the title alone).

I've been posting on this website for a year now, and I haven't actually had interesting things in my inbox as a result of my blogs. However, this HAS been my experience with social media. When I was active on twitter (2018-2020) I was constantly getting DMs from people I didn’t know, with opinions or solutions for things I was curious about. I didn’t have to think about a posting schedule the way people do with SEO. I was just active, and consistent, and like magic I had an audience (and people in my inbox).

There are many things wrong with twitter (when people would tell me they know me from twitter I would instinctively apologise!) but that feeling of access, and knowing someone, is undeniable. Community is very important to me, and I feel like I’ve been fairly successful in building it over the last few years - physically. When I got off twitter mid-pandemic, I lost that online community and without it, I feel a little incomplete.

I was able to build community physically by being very intentional about it. In my home, I made spaces for people to sit, and to work from. I put out an ashtray even if I don’t smoke. I put guides for the shower and spare toothbrushes in the other room. I stock oatmilk I don’t drink. It’s easy to make a home inviting because I live there! But I don’t live on this blog - I live in my website framework and my writing app and my linear board. Other people visit this blog, sure, but they mostly see me in their emails or their rss feeds.

I didn’t have to think about building community with twitter - I just posted! Consistency is easy when you’re doing drugs. I was young, dumb, and inflammatory enough that I didn’t need to think about “best time to post” because the algorithm always worked for me. I suppose, when there’s no algorithm, I am going to have to be a lot more intentional about how I create online community.

To do with my website so it becomes more like home

(links go to my linear board)

[ ] better typography so people are invited to take a seat and read
[ ] a dark mode so people can do this where they want
[ ] comments
[ ] a footer!
[ ] more experiments, and things that bring joy. Audio on clicks, and cursor magic, and sunset backgrounds.
[ ] respond to the emails people send to me (sorry Mihir and Anik 😅)

I can’t go back to using social media the way I used to because it is simply unhealthy for my brain. But I enjoyed so much about it - the joy of posting, not having to introduce myself, having an archive of silliness, and even the parasocial relationships.

In ten years, I want people to open this website to develop a relationship with me.

[Blog] Define: partner

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I used to think that if someone was my partner (or I was someone's partner) there was an obligation. And that the difference between a friendship and a partnership, no matter how strong the friendship, is that with the partnership, I would be obligated to say yes. I would owe it to my partner to stretch myself to show up for them. And I think this definition worked for a little bit, but not for very long. It breaks down in all kinds of social constructs where your friends show up for you and your partners aren't in a place to do so.

In a world where sex is not exclusive to partnership, and the distinction between romantic love and platonic love are just getting more blurry, I have never been able to — and I continue to not be able to — explain the difference between my closest friends and those I would call my partner.

For a while I thought it was about role. My partner is someone I can refer to in society as a romantic partner, and since they fit the definition and they play all the parts of the role that society expects, they are my partner. It's a circular definition! I live with someone, and I have sex with them, and I claim to love them (in public), and I stretch myself for them, and I show up with them in social situations, and I introduce them to my family, and I lean against them when I'm tired, and I expect them to skip work to take care of me when I'm sick, and I do the same for them, and I let their fights affect me, and I let my fights affect them. Then we're partners, right?

But I do most of these things with my friends anyway.

A friend quoted an Urdu poem that I don’t remember the exact words to, but it went something like this:

Burn all the letters I’ve written to you, read and unread
For they contain the evidence of my love
You can extinguish that flame of letters with some water
But how can you extinguish the one in my heart?

And my answer immediately was indifference.

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. I didn't break up with my most recent partner because I hated him. I broke up with him because I felt like I stopped mattering to him.

A partner, then, is someone that you cannot be indifferent to, someone who sticks around, whose every action, opinion, and thought changes the way you exist. It affects your comport, and any decision you can make. That's a big responsibility. This definition feels lofty, but it makes sense as a descriptor to the relationships I’ve seen around me. It is something I can align with in my existing relationships. So I think for now, that's the definition I will go with.

Obviously there are a lot of fallacies here. There's lots of people who I cannot be indifferent to. My boss, for example, or the Prime Minister. But maybe your partner is someone who you don't let yourself be indifferent to, who you commit to hearing and supporting, or who you commit to letting influence you. I think that's my definition for now.