aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar

MD @z47_vc | Agenting agents | Building @DeVC_Global | past @DisneyPlusHS @Housing | 2X founder 3X CXO | Deep Learning Geek

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

@anshublog

[Kushal Byatnal @kushalbyatnal]

it’s hard to explain the 2010s microservices fever dream to anyone who wasn’t there

every day on HN, we'd wake up to an article from a new startup about how they split their app into 300 services so they could infinitely scale (never mind that they only had 100 MAUs today)

so many companies never recovered from this

it turns out, replacing simple function calls with network calls that could randomly fail isn't great for shipping velocity

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

“- Martin: every bit of code doubles the ways a program can behave, which is why humans still own systems
- The real world is messier than AI's training data, self-driving took 20 years and $170B”

[a16z @a16z]

Engineering leaders told Grepr founder and CEO Jad Naous they spend 5 to 20% of their infrastructure budget on observability, and it's buying less and less reliability.

Jad, a former a16z partner, joins a16z's Martin Casado to discuss whether AI can run production systems as well as it writes code.

Grepr sits in a company's log stream, can scan a petabyte of logs a day, cuts observability costs by about 90%, and is building AI agents that use those signals to troubleshoot production issues.

How AI is changing engineering at Jad's 10-person company:
- A data lake feature that once took one engineer about six months took Jad 10 days
- The gap between okay and great engineers on his team "just multiplied 10X"
- He runs 3-4 agent sessions at once, with a "tech lead" agent reviewing every PR

Why running live systems is a harder problem for AI:
- Jad: AI can almost tune databases, but can't yet keep servers running on its own
- Martin: every bit of code doubles the ways a program can behave, which is why humans still own systems
- The real world is messier than AI's training data, self-driving took 20 years and $170B

0:55 From Stanford to a16z to Grepr
7:00 Why observability spend stopped paying off
11:00 From autocomplete to AI that trains engineers
13:10 Why AI widens the engineer skill gap
14:55 Syntax vs semantics
18:00 Inside Jad's AI workflow
22:55 Six months of work in 10 days
24:50 Can AI reason about how systems really run?
30:10 Why AI SRE tools start in the wrong place
32:30 Can AI run a distributed cluster yet?
37:35 Why engineers buy extra capacity over predicting
39:15 How AI could trace failures in production
43:45 Why AI for ops is harder than for code
49:55 Can AI do a VC's job?
52:05 Why self-driving took 20 years and $170B
57:05 Customers skipped the AI pitch for the 90% savings

YouTube: https://t.co/Htzl2P6TGp

@jadtnaous @grepr_ai @martin_casado

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

Jhingur Janta Party will take up your case 🙌🏽

Once we have solved for protesting for other higher priority issues : You shouldn’t have to renew your passport. Visas are a scam. Driving license should be given to everyone who finishes nfs most wanted. If anyone fails jee then all Diros at all iits should resign. A few 100 others.

Aap kataar main hain! But hun aapke saath sain.

https://t.co/aqfHMfUSLF

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

I got a feeling once. Then I got it again. And feelings can’t be wrong. I agree with @TheIndianTruth_ that RBI governor should resign. I’m forming Jhingur Janta Party today! Domain registered.

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

@cosmicanuj 🔥🚀

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

Gigachad!

[Diogo Almeida @CompleteSkeptic]

Jev was multimodal all along

Yep, the Jev you know and love was an image model this whole time. We just chose to disable it because models tend to be less intelligent on other modalities.

Header: TypeSafe-Danger-Zone-Images: true

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

@FDavidsonT Only supports sign up with US CA phone #s ?

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

@ku1deep @harshilmathur Response and the original post has all of it baked in ! Ultra meta 😆

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

I got a feeling once. Then I got it again. And feelings can’t be wrong. I agree with @TheIndianTruth_ that RBI governor should resign. I’m forming Jhingur Janta Party today! Domain registered.

[Gaurav गौरव @TheIndianTruth_]

Democracy is dead in India!

I have lost a 500-ruper note and I believe my neighbour stole it. I don't have any proof that he did, but he, too, is not proving that he didn't. I am thinking of marching to Delhi to demand resignation of the RBI Governor.

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

First of many steps towards unleashing the harnesses=product=business maxim! Lfg 🚀@alokbishoyi97 and team @useRouterPlus

[Alok Bishoyi @alokbishoyi97]

Getting your inference right shouldn't be hard.

@useRouterPlus (YC F26) is live: the right model and provider for your workload, at the best price.

check out : https://t.co/HDYLVRYMEC

[Shashank Kumar @shashank_kr]

AI agents are changing how we work and collaborate, but documents are still stuck in the pre-AI era.

Agents can now create beautiful, interactive decks, dashboards, and reports in HTML. But the moment you want to collaborate on them, everything breaks down.

Google Docs wasn’t built for rich, interactive HTML or AI agents. Feedback gets scattered across Slack and email. Every edit means going back to the agent, generating a new file, and sharing another link. No real-time collaboration. No single source of truth.

We built SlashDocs to fix this.

Think Google Docs, but built for AI agents and the documents they create. Host HTML and Markdown in one central hub. Share documents, manage permissions, and comment directly on the content, just like Google Docs.

Agents can read feedback and update the same document in real time. No duplicate files, no endless back-and-forth, and everyone stays in sync.

What started as a small internal experiment in one team has now scaled across @Razorpay. 28,000+ documents created. Over 50% of all documents generated at Razorpay now live on
SlashDocs.

And today, we’re opening it up to everyone. Self-hosted. Agent-agnostic. Fully open source.

AI agents have changed how we create documents. It’s time we changed how we collaborate on them.

Try it: https://t.co/NZS0OjAm1x

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Be profitable and run your company with maximal agentic loops

You don’t need to sell more of your co anymore

$10M profit per year reinvested is like an annual Series A no dilution

The best startups do this now. No whinging about the Series A/B crunch.

You don’t need saving.

[Luke Sophinos @lukesophinos]

If you're going to survive in the AI world five years from now you have to:

1. Build for people that will never build for themselves (even if its incredibly simple to do so)

2. Make your product as close to free as possible so it doesn't even make sense to prompt and build. Then monetize in other ways (Payments, Capital, Ads, Insurance, etc.)

3. Leverage the only moats there are left: Proprietary data, network effects/marketplace dynamics, owned audience, hardware, physical stuff (supplies, etc.), offering services, regulatory, group purchasing and digital franchises.

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

Agreed

[Nicolas Bustamante @nicbstme]

One of my more controversial bets: the AI feed will be the form factor of 2027!

Most people don’t know what to prompt, and they won’t prompt their way into complicated agentic workflows. With chat, we ask users for digital labor: figure out what AI can do, explain the task, provide the context, repeat. That’s a lot to ask if we want billions of people using agents every day.

Meanwhile, people already spend hours in feeds. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. They know how to scroll, discover something useful, and act on it.

An intelligent system that knows you should bring you the next useful action. Here’s the email you need to answer, already drafted. Here are the latest sales numbers, with an update ready to send to your team. You approve, edit, dismiss, or jump into chat to go deeper. That’s how people will discover what agents can do, without having to invent a prompt first.

And you can put ads in a feed, one of the biggest business models on the internet. A system that understands your plans can recommend a relevant restaurant, product, or service, clearly labeled as sponsored. You get a reason to come back every day, useful work ready to approve, and a business model to fund the agents doing it.

[Anurag Ramdasan @anuragwho]

imo in the context of this tweet, @deedydas makes a perfect argument. if you look at the size of outcomes, there's really no logical reason to build in india.

but in the larger context, it may not hold to be true. US is the largest economy in the world and one of the most entrepreneurial nations in the world. but it doesnt make sense for all 8bn people on the planet to take the below logic and relocate to US.

there will always be people all over the world migrating to other places and making a better life for themselves and that is a noble cause. there will also be people who will chose to stay back, and improve the country they are born in which is also a noble cause.

there will be some, who will be in between, begrudgingly moved to a new country in the chase of a better life but would like to be in their home country. atleast for that lot, India of today provides a lot more opportunities than india of a decade ago and that is undeniable.

the call of "build in india" is never about being better than the US. maybe someday we get there, but today our fight is to make india worth building in and I think every day we make progress there and we justify india as a good place to build for another day.

[Vaibhav Domkundwar @vaibhavbetter]

It is so easy to gather views by picking up a few outlier examples and drawing up a conclusion for all.

I have spent plenty of time in SFBA as well as India over the past 25+ years of building/operating/investing and have come across talent in both places closely. I also know a fairly large number of folks working in tech both in the US (Silicon Valley) and India.

(1) Plenty of "smartest Indians" are staying back and choosing to build in India in spite of the constraints of lower capital. That "plenty" number is consistently growing year after year. And this has been true for a fairly long time now. So a blanket statement that "the smartest Indians continue to come to build in the US" is plain wrong. And it will be more wrong every year going forward.

(2) Most Indian companies are NOT moving their domicile to the US - ONLY THOSE who are building for the US market are doing so and that is the right thing to do to be closer to the customer, in their geo, aligned with that geo's setup/compliance/laws etc. This has nothing to do with India and everything to do with being setup correctly for the target market.

The call for "build in India" is a few people who say it again and again and need not be generalised. Today, talented Indian founders are independently deciding what they want to do with their lives, what is more important to them.

There are plenty of world class folks who are choosing to stay in India. Plenty of world class researchers who are choosing to move back to India after decades in the US.

And there are plenty of founders who are choosing to move to the US to build their by being closer to their customers and capital for their businesses.

We don't need to paint only one side of the story because it is literally one side. The other side is equally full and real.

So, if you really want to know what "the smartest Indians" are doing in 2026 look at the real data - it is not so hard to see.

[Jason Shuman @JasonrShuman]

The three startup types
1. Model companies
2. Deployment companies
3. Data companies

You might start as one, but chances are you’ll end up being multiple

[UK (Utkrishta Kumar) @youkaey]

Rationality is sometimes wildly overrated.

The biggest decisions in life are not made on spreadsheets. Who you marry, what you choose to build and where you choose to belong.

If I get goosebumps when I hear A.R. Rahman sing Vande Mataram - not sure if I can put a price to that feeling.

15 years ago, I had the choice to move to the US. I chose India. Not because I had calculated that it would maximise my financial returns. But because I wanted to be here. Because I belong here. Because I am deeply optimistic about what we can change.

And even if that turns out to be a financially suboptimal decision - perfectly okay with it.

It makes me happy. It gives me purpose. It gives me the energy to show up every morning and build something that matters.

Not every decision needs to maximise wealth. Some decisions maximise meaning of who you are.

India first. India first. India first.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

[aacash.eth - Aakash Kumar @RTinkslinger]

Just heard the clown roach-dip-kick use the phrase “30 saal ke bachche” (translation: 30 year old kids) to refer to himself and other dim wit puppet colleagues of his.

All these ‘kids’ should be put on a national open registry,one that the remainder of the civilised world can refer to and ensure that the kids get the right protection and safety net from real world.

They shouldn’t be burdened with employment and work and any worldly things. They truly deserve it. We have to protect the kids!

Real work should be the burden of only 18+ men and women