Chandra Vattikuti

Love building Products and Businesses and most love, building teams that love building the former. On a Sabbatical, formerly CPO @ InMobi, Coffee @ Bangalore,

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

This weekend, I am getting a master's degree in "Evolution and anatomical differences between Pokemons". The teacher was my younger one. I flunked the class.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Not that bad currently.

I am on Claude Max and Chatgpt Go as paid plans. Have a few debris accounts for OpenArt and almost all of the pro subscriptions that Lenny facilitated. Gave up on Perplexity pro but might have to decide between Perplexity and Get Clicky pro when the use cases become obvious.

TLDR - Expensive but worth every Dollar & Rupee.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Anthropic has cooked with Fable.

Artefacts generated with Opus 4.8 & Sonnet 4.6 always seemed to have a personality of a smart, but an over-eager analyst. Stating the obvious at times, with an air of "believing" that what they said was genuinely insightful.

Fable artefacts have a tone and assuredness of someone who knows that they are good and do not need to shout from the rooftop. Like the top decile of colleagues i have worked with on both both reliability and quality of output.

#Anthropic #Fable

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

@cvkrishnan Besides meeting the ORR at a perfect right angle and traffic on ORR forking into service lane and flyover at exact point that the flyover joins ORR :-)

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Yes please. Can we get back to country building.

[Uday Kotak @udaykotak]

Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.
Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.
It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe.
Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Got around to installing and using Clicky today. I thought Claude Cowork was awesome and jaw drop experience.

Clicky just bested it like nothing .. Product taste in action.

[Farza 🇵🇰🇺🇸 @FarzaTV]

Watch me control my computer with just my voice. This is the future of operating systems.

No hands.

GPT-Realtime 2.0 is very, very underrated.

Demo:

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Context decay is one potential reason but don't think that was the primary reason. Some of it just poor UX (Open AI vis a vis claude) and Models fibbing ( about doing something and promising and update and then nothing happening) and being pyschohantic even when expliticly instructed to not be the same.

More layers than context bloat or decay.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

AI Agent personality is a thing. Daily, agent mood swings is also a thing.

Its almost like my rockstar agents (employees) became, overcommitting, underdelivering work shirks yesterday :-)

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

@paraschopra Thanks

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Banger.

Was becoming a pain to create and share artefacts (google docs) and build standalone specs / requirements without stuff building up over time.

Just a day in of doing HTML and the specs are already a lot more useful.

[Thariq @trq212]

https://t.co/MXt5XS4xBX

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Is this, the right thing to do ?

#IYKYK

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

This is so damn fascinating .. a natural language articulation of AI model's intentions / thought process ?

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Anthropic research: Natural Language Autoencoders.

Models like Claude talk in words but think in numbers. The numbers—called activations—encode Claude’s thoughts, but not in a language we can read.

Here, we train Claude to translate its activations into human-readable text.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Great start at Imola @MagmaRacing / @GenesisUSA

Rooting for you @ Le Mans.

[Genesis USA @GenesisUSA]

Built with precision, driven by purpose 🟠

This is the Genesis Magma Racing GMR-001 Hypercar.

#GenesisMagma #Hypercar #WEC

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

With the right harness, it's a lot easier to rewrite the stack.

The big precondition is that it needs the right articulation of hard constraints of behaviour that systems (pre and post refactoring/rewrite) need to hold against.

[Aditya Paliwal @VastoLorde95]

The migration in numbers:

- Team of 16 engineers worked over 6 weeks.
- We reduced our footprint from 6M CPU cores, to just 10k cores.
- We are now using the same Grok-based transformer models that power your home timeline.
- Eliminated 15 years of tech debt - replaced 1M LOC of Scala with just 50k LOC of Rust and Python

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Most comments on Twitter come with loads of context of lived experiences of the person posting and what they had in mind, when they were making the comments that they make.

Gokul is right, so is lenny, so is karri and the many awesome folks on the timeline. It's one of those strange posts, where you agree with most people on the timeline.

Brilliant design is hard and rare. That will always have a seat at the table. But design as a function that stands as one of the critical pillars in Product Management, will become lean unfortunately.

Most other functions which are enablement to core purpose of creation and putting that products in hands of user (engineering, product, design, product marketing, stand alone analytics / data teams in that order, will eventually become very lean and have subject matter specialists that steer the direction for agents to iterate and produce options that are selected from). Set the bar / infra and then let Agents produce options or execute chunks of work.

Its the greatest time to be a creator of products, its the worst time to have self esteem tied to professional titles.

cc @gokulr

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

DESIGN: THE FIRST AI CASUALTY

I'm increasingly sure that 2026 signals the end of product design as a full-fledged stand-alone function within companies. If so, it will be the first role / function to be eliminated by AI on a go-forward basis.

Instead of hiring FT designers, startups are hiring / will hire design consultants to create a design system that the founder likes (this takes a few weeks max). Once the design system is finalized, PM/Eng feed it into their AI tool of choice to generate prototypes. The design system is refreshed annually by the same consultant.

Larger companies will likely not backfill design roles and will do some targeted attrition to reduce the design department to 20% the size it is today.

If you're a designer, I think you have two choices:
1. Become an entrepreneur: Start a design agency and become the go-to resource for design systems for startups and even larger companies. This can be a good recurring revenue business.
2. Become a builder: Add PM/Eng responsibilities to become a product builder.

Would suggest you embrace this proactively vs waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I'm really sorry about this - some of my best friends and the people I admire most and have learnt the most from are designers - but it seems inevitable.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Some architectural & real estate use cases, which were too difficult or too error prone for Nano banana are a breeze for GPT Image 2.

They cooked well ..

[Arena.ai @arena]

Exciting news - GPT-Image-2 by @OpenAI has claimed the #1 spot across all Image Arena leaderboards!

A clean sweep with a record-breaking +242 point lead in Text-to-Image - the largest gap we’ve seen to date.

- #1 Text-to-Image (1512), +242 over #2 (Nano-banana-2 with web-search aka gemini-3.1-flash-image)
- #1 Single-Image Edit (1513), +125 over #2 (Nano-banana-pro aka gemini-3-pro-image)
- #1 Multi-Image Edit (1464), +90 over #2 (Nano-banana-2)

No model has dominated Image Arena with margins this wide.

Huge congratulations to @OpenAI on this major breakthrough in image generation! More performance breakdowns by category in the thread below.

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Bengaluru traffic will continue to be unberable around ORR (Inspite of Blue Line, may be PRR too).

Most of the new, RERA registered construction projects in this part of the town, are coming up to the right of the Outer Ring Road and the primary through fares of Sarjapur Road, Kadubeesanahalli-Varthur road, ITPL Road and Maratahalli road are already choked and mass transit systems along these roads are not even at conceptual stage (barring ITPL main road).

What is driving all of this construction in these areas and how are people planning to live in and commute to work, from these areas ?

[Note - There is an inherent assumption that most folks commute to ORR or CBD for work. Blue dots are RERA registered projects under construction].

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

Insomnia, has some benefits ..

#ClaudeMythos

[Chandra Vattikuti @VCShekhar]

@HeyGen VideoAgent