Aayush Giri

devrel | crypto x ai | i build tools and explain how they work →

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

copynpaste, 7 weeks in

- 6,300 people in the last 90 days
- 4 paying users
- 12 integrations shipped, every one from a user email
- $0 on marketing

built it because pasting between apps kept wrecking my formatting. turns out it wasn't just me

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

somewhere between the broken builds, confusing errors and "one last change", you actually got better at this.

give yourself credit for that.

now commit your code and go to sleep.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

web3 developers:
what are you building right now?
not the polished pitch. not the roadmap.
the actual thing you're working on this week.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

your test suite isn't slowing you down.

it's telling you how much confidence you actually have in your code.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

there's a special kind of confidence that comes from fixing a bug without understanding why it was broken.

enjoy it for 5 minutes.

then write the tests.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

paying for an API without giving the provider a permanent identity trail?

that's the kind of practical privacy problem zero-knowledge proofs can help solve.

cryptography gets interesting when it makes better products possible.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

what's the last tool you tried and uninstalled within a day, and why

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

one of my favourite things about zero-knowledge proofs is that they challenge an assumption we've accepted for too long:

why should proving something be true require revealing everything?

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

not every problem needs a blockchain.

but if your system needs shared ownership, verifiable execution and coordination without trusting one operator, now we're having an interesting conversation.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

your github contribution graph is not a measure of how good an engineer you are.

one well-designed system can be worth more than 500 meaningless commits.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

reading code you wrote six months ago is just a group project with a stranger

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

AI making vulnerability discovery faster is exciting.

AI making vulnerability discovery faster for attackers too is the part we can't ignore.

the window between finding a bug and fixing it matters more than ever.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

what's one thing in software engineering that people pretend is easy but absolutely isn't?

i'll start: authentication.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

if your protocol needs constant incentives to convince people to use it, you might not have product-market fit.

you might just have expensive users.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

we're giving AI agents access to terminals, credentials, cloud infrastructure and wallets.

but the question isn't just "how smart is the agent?"

it's "what can it do when it gets something wrong?"

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

unpopular opinion: knowing how to use AI tools doesn't make you a good engineer.
knowing when their output is wrong does.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

the bug was supposed to take 10 minutes.
it's now a core contributor to the project.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

side projects usually die the week the first bug report shows up

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

AI won't make good engineers irrelevant.

but engineers who refuse to adapt might make that argument for everyone else.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

most people don't want to build in crypto.

they want to be associated with something that succeeds.

[Aayush Giri @AayushStack]

ethereum delaying an upgrade because of a security concern is a good reminder:

shipping on schedule is nice.

not breaking existing contracts is better.