Harish Vaidyanathan

Reborn Maker.
Next: TBA!
Formerly: Product & Growth @HaticaHQ, Product @GetVymo, Developer relations @Microsoft
Always: Running, Food, Beer

[Sathya Sankaran @tweetenator]

I kept hitting the same wall.

Maps for India scattered, no clear provenance, formats gatekept, no easy way to share your own.

So I built bharatlas. The wiki for India's maps.

View, slice, download. Drop your own to publish. Open data, open code.

→ https://t.co/oNGTxymmPy

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Marc Benioff to SaaS CEOs upset about AI hurting their valuations: Grow up, wipe your tears, focus on the customer

Chamath:

“ Let's say you were running a software company that was before the AI wave and you're private.

There's a bunch of these companies that were supposed to go public, (but) didn't go public.

What should they do? What do those boards do?”

Marc @Benioff:

“Here's some Kleenex for them for all their tears.

I mean, I talk to these CEOs, they're crying, "Look at my market cap, I'm not getting paid for my work."

Guys, grow up.

That's what I love about the public markets, they rationalize everything all the time. So great, be in the public markets.

You want to be in a private market? Your valuation is fantasyland until somebody's actually going to pay you.

So I just tell them, focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, focus on your innovation.

How are you going to add value to your customers?

That's what's really, truly important.”

[RUN’IX @RUN_IX]

🍼 Découvrez la 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙚́𝙜𝙞𝙚 𝙣𝙪𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 millimétrée de Yomif Kejelcha (🇪🇹) à l’occasion de son marathon en 1H59’41 à Londres ! Le plan était simple : survivre 42,195 kilomètres 💪

𝙋𝙤𝙞𝙙𝙨 → 59,5 kilogrammes
𝙏𝙖𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙚 → 1,87 mètres
𝙍𝙚́𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙚 𝙜𝙡𝙮𝙘𝙤𝙜𝙚̀𝙣𝙚 → 580 grammes
𝘼𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩 𝙜𝙡𝙪𝙘𝙞𝙙𝙞𝙦𝙪𝙚 𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙞��𝙞𝙚́ → 287 grammes

Son plan nutrition à la veille du marathon :

𝟴𝗛𝟬𝟬 → Pain blanc avec miel + banane 🍌
𝟵𝗛𝟯𝟬 → Boisson de récup’ + banane
𝟭𝟭𝗛𝟯𝟬 → Boisson Unusual Nitrous 🍼
𝟭𝟮𝗛𝟬𝟬 → Riz, pomme de terre + poulet rôti
𝟭𝟲𝗛𝟬𝟬 → Pain blanc avec miel
𝟭𝟴𝗛𝟯𝟬 → Boisson Unusual Nitrous 🍼
𝟮𝟬𝗛𝟬𝟬 → Riz, pomme de terre + banane 🍌

Son plan nutrition le jour J du marathon :

À lire ici ➡️ https://t.co/jU6chffb2h.

« La marge était minimale et l’objectif était clair : arriver au kilomètre 35 avec les réservoirs aussi pleins que possible pour jouer la victoire ! »

Histoire, méthode et 𝙙𝙚́𝙩𝙖𝙞𝙡𝙨 très intéressants 👀

[The Best @TheBestqueenx]

This is how you advertise watches...

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

@imgeeksonfeet Fantastic execution and smashing each boundary as they appear ... next up 40:00!!!

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

Didn't run #TCSWorld10k today, showed up to see & cheer the #runners, did the job with pride until the vocal cords & the palm hurt from the high-fives. Seemed like one heck of a fun race. Runner friends did very well & those who didn't are obviously not friends any more 😁😈

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

@Agent_Oli Good one but unfortunately They’ll tell you their recent race results, 5K/10K/HM/FM PB, LT pace, LTHR and injury niggles as part of “tell me about yourself” … so are you really sure you want to do this? ����

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

Took 6+ ...
was it easy? No!
was it worth it? Yes!
did it mean anything? No!
did it take everything? Yes!

#running

[geeksonfeet @geeksonfeet]

For those who have broken the 4-hour mark in the marathon, how many attempts did it take you? #geekspoll

Let us know more about your journey in the replies!

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

Historic!

This is the highest quality video ever taken of the moon!

[Aswathy Santhosh @_Aswathy_S]

When was the last time Indian football got this much positive global attention? I honestly can’t remember.

So proud of Manisha Kalyan. Her free-kick vs Chinese Taipei is going viral everywhere 🇮🇳⚽️

#IndianFootball #ManishaKalyan

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

The unpredictability of the double pendulum.
https://t.co/FCJN0DoD7l

[geeksonfeet @geeksonfeet]

What does a strong race execution look like in practice? Harish’s @harishv race report from the Cognizant New Delhi Marathon 2026 gives a very useful look into that.

+ He ran , earned his BQ, and negative split the race. Steady first half & super fast second half
+ 100K+ weeks
+ GMP progression workouts
+ strong long-run structure
+ fueling above 60g carbs per hour

Worth reading if you are preparing for your next full marathon.

https://t.co/SduE4FlVoh

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

For all runners who try mathing while #running …

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild.

5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals.

The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today.

The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century.

People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable.

60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild.

5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals.

The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today.

The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century.

People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable.

60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

Interviewer: What’s your superpower?
Me: I spell everything currectly

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

@StravaSupport Garmin sync issues since last evening? Having to manually upload .FIT files for activities to show up in Strava.

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

When your manager is changed and you have a new manager, the single best mental model to use to be successful is to consider that you have a new job.

Don't masquerade this as adaptation, its not that. You have a new job, come up with a new 30-60-90 plan and deliver that!

[Harish Vaidyanathan @harishv]

THIS! 🔥

[Iceland Cricket @icelandcricket]

Dear @ICC,

It is with a heavy heart that we now announce our unavailability to replace Pakistan in the upcoming T20 World Cup. Regardless of whether they now withdraw, the short timescales ensure it is impossible for our squad to prepare in the professional manner necessary to compete effectively in this global cricketing spectacle. We are not like Scotland and able to turn up on a whim, with no kit sponsor.

Our players are from all walks of life and cannot simply drop their occupations to fly halfway around the world to experience temperatures only normally felt in Finnish saunas. Our captain, a professional baker, needs to attend to his oven, our ship captain needs to steer his vessel, and our bankers need to go bankrupt (again). This is the harsh reality of cricket at the amateur level of the game.

This news will be extremely disappointing to our fans. Despite being the most peaceful nation on Earth, we maintain an army of online followers, and are the world's 14th most followed national board on X. We were ready to give the Dutch the biggest shock they have experienced since William of Orange lost the Battle of Landen in 1693. And the Americans were looking forward to taking on Greenland, or so their orange-dyed leader thought.

Our loss is likely Uganda's gain. We wish them well. Their kits cannot be missed unless you have epilepsy, in which case they are probably best avoided.

The future is always ice, until it isn't.

Yours sincerely,

Icelandic Cricket Association

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

Our CFO asked me to "audit" our software subscriptions last week.

He sent me a spreadsheet with 200 rows. Slack, Zoom, Jira, Notion, Trello, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

He wanted me to survey the team to see which tools were essential.

I told him: "Surveys are for people who care about feelings. I care about OpEx."

I deleted the spreadsheet.

Instead, I logged into the corporate Amex portal and reported the card as lost.

Every single auto-renewal in the company failed instantly.

I call this "The Scream Test."

It’s simple Darwinian procurement.

If a tool goes down and nobody runs to my desk screaming within 4 hours? We didn't need it.

The Marketing team was at my door in 10 minutes begging for Adobe. We renewed it. The Sales team was crying about the CRM in 20 minutes. We renewed it.

But here’s the interesting part.

The HR department’s "Employee Wellness & Engagement Portal" ($12,000/year) has been down for six days.

Not a single person has noticed.

I didn't just save money. I quantified the exact value of our corporate culture.

It is zero.

Stop auditing. Start unplugging. If it’s important, they’ll scream. If they don't scream, it’s just noise.