Shalu Codes

NITian | Full Stack Dev building AI-powered products 🤖 | Turning code into passive income | JAVA • Angular | Building in public | Hopeful.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

Months of building and shipping AI systems made me realize - one thing that makes agentic workflows work is good old best devops practices.

If you do not have proper tooling, clean (and also well-defined) processes, and ephemeral environments set up, an AI agent cannot run or help you reliably. Be it agentic SDLC, running evals, phased agent rollouts, circuit breakers, database access, or anything else.

Think about what an agent actually needs to do good work. It needs a safe place to run code, a fast feedback loop to know if something broke, and clear boundaries between development, staging, and production.

Most skip this and go straight to "let the agent write and deploy code." Then they hit weird failures, lose trust in the system (and even AI), and quietly give up on agentic workflows altogether.

The fix is not about AI at all. It is the same old devops discipline that made human engineering teams reliable in the first place.

Good things die hard :)

[V @v4vihan]

HIRING: Founding Engineer

📍 Location: India (GGN, BLR) // Remote
💰 Pay: $100K - $150K; + 0.5-2.5% equity
🔗 Referral bonus: $10K if you connect me to the person I hire

A billion new traders are coming online. None of them are human. RAETH is the exchange where AI agents trade everything.

As the founding engineer you'll own core exchange infra end-to-end.

Looking for:
+ 5+ yrs architecting serious production systems (C++, Rust)
+ Raw intellectual horsepower (ex: built something substantial from scratch, top competition rank, etc.)
+ Prior experience in high-performance financial software (trading, payments, exchanges) a big plus
+ Incredibly high agency and conscientiousness

To apply: DM or email [email protected] with your resume and a one-liner about the most exceptional thing you've ever achieved (ex: pnl generated, startup sold, olympiad ra nk, system built, etc.).

p.s. please only apply if you truly satisfy the requirements (ex: 5+ YOE)

[Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸 @FarzaTV]

We built an AI that can draw on your screen.

It's a true personal tutor.

Using Claude Opus we're able to draw polygons, point with pixel perfect accuracy, and walk users through complex steps directly on their screen.

Here's me learning Pythagorean Theorem + FL Studio.

Demo:

[Finn Mallery @fin465]

in @ycombinator they have a playbook on how to get customers ASAP for your startup.

if you follow this, you’ll brute force your way to 100 customers, almost no matter what your product is.

Here it is:

1/ launch-max.

product hunt, hackerNews, devhunt, betalist, peerlist, indie hackers, etc. YC tells you to launch 3 times MINIMUM

2/ pull your competitor’s strongest backlinks and get yourself listed in the same places.

whatever article they have listed, you make a better version and ask the site to replace it (or supplement) with yours.

3/ WARM OUTBOUND.

Everyone knows about building in public. but you still need to capitalize on the 99% of leads who see your content but don’t come inbound

scrape everyone who likes your posts on Linkedin each week, check if they fit your customer profile, and message them.

you set this up to fire automatically with @origamichat (i dropped a prompt in the comments)

4/ find 20 to 30 ugc creators on tiktok / instagram in your niche. ask them to create content about your product, ideally from a fresh account.

pay them a fixed fee ($15–$30 per video) plus performance incentives ($1k for 1 million views, etc).

you can use @sideshift_app (best creators imo) and line up 20+ of these creators in 1 day

5/ when building in public, a video is 10x better than an image/text - spam use cases of ur product on X/Linkedin

6/ figure out where your customers actually spend time.

which slack/discord groups are they in? what newsletters do they open? which podcasts and accounts do they follow? pay those people for shoutouts

7/ there's a fresh trend on x basically every week. jump on the relevant ones and fold your product in (like i’m doing right now).

To find trends i just use Origami & search “Lead Gen/GTM posts that are viral on X” to find the best posts every week in my niche

Then, I will reply to those, quote tweet them, and use the formats that work myself

(that’s the secret to why my account has high engagement BTW - you can do this too)
---------

if you are doing all this every single week and DO NOT GIVE UP (launching, posting demos, contacting new customers)

I guarantee you will hit your customer goals. Then the game becomes retention.

will be posting 2-3 more growth hacks every single week

[Eli Mernit @mernit]

One piece of advice we got during YC was to explain our company using verbs instead of nouns.

Early on, I walked into a meeting and did the opposite:

“We’re building a cloud platform for AI”

No one knew that that meant, their eyes glazed over. Then I started saying this instead:

“We containerize your code and run it on GPUs in the cloud so you don’t have to manage the infra yourself”

That clicked way more. Our brains understand verbs because they’re more concrete. If you describe your company using nouns, you risk people not understanding you.

And no one buys or invests in things they don’t understand.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

Be visibly competent.

If you have skills but others do not know about them, you will never get the opportunities you deserve. Make your abilities visible, and ensure that what you bring to the table is impossible to ignore.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

GitHub went down for ~70 minutes yesterday. Interestingly, the root cause was not a database (the usual suspect), but an auth was returning 401s. Although outages are not good, we as engineers can learn a thing or two from them. Here's a quick dissection...

So, about 15% of API traffic started getting "Unauthorized" responses for requests that were perfectly valid. The credentials were fine. But the 'infra' was lying. Here is the part that makes this interesting.

Every well-behaved HTTP client reauths when it receives 401. So thousands of apps did exactly what they were supposed to do - and that made things worse.

Every client getting a false 401 (root cause for 401 not mentioned yet) kicked off a token refresh, which piled more load onto an already struggling auth layer. Here is my key takeaway...

When a 401 comes back, we typically reauthenticate, and we should. But if we get 10 consecutive 401s on a token that was just refreshed, reauthenticating again is not the answer. That is a circuit-breaker moment - back off, raise an alert, and stop hammering the system.

Retrying blindly in an auth-failure loop could turn an incident into a full outage. So, this is something you can account for when building your next system :)

Hope this helps.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

PMs have started shipping code to production, I am just glad that git blame exists.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

pro tip: get good at sounding confident even when you know nothing. ask questions when essential, and trust yourself to figure the rest out.

because everything is figureoutable.

[Abhishek Naidu @abhisheknaiidu]

we’re just 6 cracked ppl in engineering reaching double digit Million ARR soon

we at @Saturn__OS (YC S24) are hiring for 2 more MTS roles

if you’re curious and passionate about Reinventing Financial Infrastructure and want to join a small team of engineers and designer, dm me.

[Abhi Varde @varde_abhi]

Going through a tough time. Actively looking for work.

Last 6 months:
→ Merged PRs in @better_auth @appwrite @mintlify @umami_software
→ 150+ GitHub stars, 4K+ npm downloads
→ Shipped 10+ products app

Frontend & Product Engineer. 3+ yrs. Available now.

DM or retweet. 🙏

[Juned Khatri | Engineer Turned Recruiter 🇮🇳 @hijunedkhatri]

Hiring AI engineers in Gurgaon is challenging,
Good candidates who are based in Gurgaon are already with with @zomato @letsblinkit and few good orgs.

Candidates from Mumbai or BLR don't really wanna leave their current city and move to Gurgaon.

How would you deal with this situation?

[Shalu Codes @ShaluCodes]

@codewprince Interested

[Shalu Codes @ShaluCodes]

@nitesh_singh5 Interested.

[Kalash @kalashvasaniya]

when i was in my final year of college (in 2025)

i just kept applying for jobs, sending 20+ cold emails a day, not really knowing wtf i was doing

after endless rejections, i finally decided to do what i love, and that is building products

fast forward to today, in just 9 months after graduation, yesterday i made 1.2 lakhs ($1250+) in a single day

and in those 9 months, i got 13 job offers, 25+ client offers, and people keep asking for consulting

this period taught me a lot of things, and one of them is: do what you love and just keeeeep goinggggg, something way better is waiting for you

[Rozzabuilds @rozzabuilds]

If you’re building a startup and looking for users, post in these subreddits:

r/entrepreneur
r/startups
r/saaS
r/sideProject
r/indiehackers
r/growthHacking
r/productivity
r/smallbusiness
r/entrepreneurRideAlong
r/buildinpublic
r/solopreneur
r/microSaas
r/startup_resources
r/appIdeas
r/business_Ideas
r/startup_Ideas
r/scaleinpublic
r/indiebiz
r/growmybusiness
r/webdev
r/webdesign
r/marketing
r/ecommerce
r/freelance
r/internetIsBeautiful
r/analytics
r/SEO
r/socialMediaMarketing
r/advertising
r/PPC
r/content_marketing
r/askMarketing
r/roastMyStartup
r/alphaandBetaUsers
r/startups_promotion
r/plugyourproduct
r/madethis
r/imadethis

Share your story and ask for feedback at a minimum. Make the post engaging. Don't just drop a link.

Save this for launch week!

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

When you encounter something new, and it does not 'click', in most cases, it happens because you likely do not have a mental model to process it.

Some people learn fast because they have built mental models, knowingly or unknowingly. For example, a new distributed systems paper lands, and they immediately map it to the trade-offs and patterns they have seen before.

Here is how to build the right mental models:

1. Start with first principles, of course :-)

When you learn something, ask not just "how does it work" but "why does it work this way." Understand the problem it is solving, the constraints, and the trade-offs that were made. For example, Redis chose push-based replication because of its speed-first philosophy. That is not a fact to memorize, but a model to carry forward.

2. Teach it.

Writing or explaining something forces you to find the gaps. If you cannot explain it clearly, you do not have a model and understanding yet; you have a collection of loosely related facts.

3. Build small prototypes.

Abstract understanding solidifies into a model only when you make it concrete. One prompt will help you build a quick prototype and demonstrate the concept. This will help you move from "I read about this" to "I know how this behaves."

4. Connect it to what you already know.

Every new concept you encounter, ask where it fits. Is it a variation of a pattern you have seen? Does it contradict something you believed? Try to place it in relation to your existing knowledge - and this is how the model forms.

Over time, this will compound. Each new mental model helps you build the next one. More importantly, you stop re-learning the same class of problem and start recognizing patterns and structure faster.

To be honest, the goal is not to know more things. It is to carry fewer, stronger frameworks that explain more things.

You will always start confused, but mental models will not let you stay in that state forever.

Hope this helps.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

I'm hiring.

Looking for a Creative Marketing Lead for my AI startup. If you, or someone you know, is a cold-blooded killer w/ content marketing, UGC campaigns, ad creative, etc., then I want to talk.

$1000 referral fee.

Job description commented below.

[Shalu Codes @ShaluCodes]

@robbigiew 👋

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

If your code depends on a database, an external service, or a specific set of permissions -- verify those conditions the moment the process boots up. If something is missing or misconfigured, crash immediately.

Do not let the process 'limp' forward only to die 2 hours into a run because some credentials were missing. This pattern is called fail-fast, and it is one of the simplest, highest-leverage practices that should always be followed.

Here are a few things to check on startup

- can you reach the database?
- do env vars exist and are they non-empty?,
- do you have the permissions you need?
- are the downstream services reachable?

None of this is complex to write. A few checks and guard clauses at the top of your main function are all it takes. When your code does crash mid-run, it should be because something genuinely unexpected happened -- not because a config value was missing (fixable issues).

Late crashes from fixable issues are not just a waste of time. I have followed this since my very first job, and it has saved me countless hours :)

Hope this helps.