Pushp Raj Saurabh

Engineering Leader@PhonePe | Founder @KnudgeMe(5M+ · Editors' Choice).
Obsessed with Code, Capital & Cardio - because compounding works everywhere.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

https://t.co/3D0u8DEKRs

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Interaction is abundant. Understanding is scarce.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

"AI will take your job" is half right.

Every technology follows the same arc:
scarce → expensive → cheap → invisible.

The internet made "being online" the floor. Cloud made infrastructure a utility. AI is making intelligence abundant.

The optimistic version skips the painful part.

When a capability gets commoditized, people lose jobs. Entire professions can shrink before new opportunities emerge.

But the value doesn't disappear. It moves.

Nobody could clearly see social media managers, growth marketers, or creator businesses before the internet.

And it won't stop with AI.
Robotics is next. The arc doesn't care which technology it's running on.

The real question isn't whether AI takes jobs.

It's:
When intelligence becomes the floor, who captures the value built on top of it?

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@TTrimoreau More than ever! But learning solely that won't be enough.

Code + product sense + distribution + market understanding + business thinking.

AI can write code. It still can't own the outcome.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Is this the beginning of a world where frontier AI is treated like strategic infrastructure- available only to a select few!?
Or is this an overreaction(or maybe a political move) aimed specifically at Anthropic?

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@araseb_ AI accelerates execution. It doesn't replace craftsmanship :)

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@anupamrjp Building will be the easiest part. The journey to the first 100 customers will be the toughest :)

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

The hottest AI take right now is:

"Prompting is dead. Just build loops."

The colder, more accurate take:

"Craft isn't."

The difference between AI slop and exceptional work isn't the model or the workflow.
It's the person with craft willing to spend another hour obsessing over details after everyone else hits publish.

One-shot prompts produce one-shot thinking. The craft lives in the edits, the taste, the judgment, and the obsession over tiny details.

AI accelerates execution. It doesn't replace craftsmanship.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@babayagatwt AI hasn't replaced nearly as many people as headlines suggest. What it has replaced is the need to explain layoffs. "We're becoming AI-first" sounds a lot better than "we overhired in 2021." :)

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@pcshipp My tweet from 10 days back 😀:

https://t.co/gRMq3XBRft

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Claude Code's edge over Cursor/Copilot isn't Sonnet/Opus!
It's the harness Anthropic built around it.
You ever throw a lazy, underspecified prompt at Claude Code and it just..gets it?
The best AI products won't be won at the model layer. They'll be won at the scaffolding layer.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@pcshipp Claude Code, hands down. The harness, tooling, and overall developer experience feel far more mature.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Claude Code's edge over Cursor/Copilot isn't Sonnet/Opus!
It's the harness Anthropic built around it.
You ever throw a lazy, underspecified prompt at Claude Code and it just..gets it?
The best AI products won't be won at the model layer. They'll be won at the scaffolding layer.

[Aditya Bandi @bandiaditya]

I’m thrilled to announce we’ve raised $44M to build a new home for product design. Meet @noondesign.

No workflow is more broken and fragmented in 2026 than the product designers’. The very same people who care most about building software don’t have software purpose built for them. @kushagrasinha7 and I have lived this problem first hand as designers ourselves.

That’s why we built Noon. The first product design tool that works entirely on your product code, so you can design not only how a product looks, but also how it works. With AI at its core that works in seconds, not minutes.

For the first time, you can create, iterate, build, test and ship. All in one canvas. No translations or roundtrips to the codebase and back.

Comment “Get Noon” and we’ll get you on the list for early access.

[Sandeep Manudhane @sandeep_PT]

WARNING
Massive AI hype being built in a sudden burst
(and most of it fake)

1) A scary article: I was surprised to read a long article on Twitter (X) claiming it's just 6-12 months before a Covid-like event changes this world. It claims this will be the AI-event, where most white-collar jobs worldwide would be gone, because AI is that good now. That article got 100 M plus views. Clearly, people are spooked (naturally). So the psy-op has worked.
(and I saw other similar dark articles too)

2) Suddenly many influencers are pushing the same narrative, and it so turns out that media reported many are being paid heavy sums by AI firms to push their story (that AI singularity is arriving). But if AI is "revolutionary", does it need an influencer push? No. This should be a clear signal it's hyped.

3) A correction in IT stocks' and SaaS stock's prices is suddenly creating a doom scenario about these companies dying any moment now, with second- and third-order effects on entire economy. Stock investors who haven't studied AI technicals are automatically assuming it's all over, dead, gone, finished. WRONG. NO.

4) What is the truth, and what's most likely to happen?
In my opinion, based on years of observing AI trends, reading and learning AI technology, and doing AI at various levels, my take is as follows. I urge you to read this, and preserve your sanity. Please don't panic, nothing catastrophic is happening anytime soon.

A) IPO pressure: AI firms are going crazy pushing their God-narrative, as many giant IPOs are lined up soon. They need public to buy their paid subscriptions or else the story goes kaput. So they are creating a false hype. It's shameful, anti-social and deeply hurtful.
(Almost all AI firms released doom-scenarios just before their next funding rounds; investors who haven't learnt technology fall for it; pure FOMO. This playbook is so repetitive it's comical)
B) OpenAI is spooked: Sam Altman has lost the lead he temporarily managed to build against Google and others, and now his loss-making enterprise isn't the darling of any investor any more. He's terrified.
C) Elon Musk's Grok does not have the traction in consumer space anyway near what's needed to make it a profit-making entity. So with many other capex-heavy AI firms. But the GPU / TPU hungry AI ops need more capex each day, not less. It's a dead-end for most except cash rich Googles.
D) Enterprise AI is patchy, lagging, slow, choppy: Anyone who has ever built a company, or run a large department, or consulted a business enterprise knows how random, undefined, tacit, and unstructured most of the real world work actually is. No way is AI ever going to replace humans doing those very complex things on a daily basis. No way. Not tomorrow, not in 10 years. NO.
(I am not even beginning to get into 'regulated' industries' needs)
E) Consumer AI is cool, but has limits: The more AI regular humans (of all ages) use, the more the artificiality of it becomes apparent to anyone. The novelty cannot sustain the commercial numbers needed to make AI (foundation models) profitable. OpenAI and Perplexity would never have given free tiers for most Indians otherwise. They desperately need folks to stick to this opium.
F) LLMs aren't solved, Hallucinations aren't zero: The structure of any LLM is such that it will ALWAYS hallucinate, no matter how much fine-tuning humans do. In most sensitive business operations, you cannot allow LLMs to control the core data at all. Can you run an airline with a Generative AI system (LLM-based) that's 98% accurate? Can you run a precision-mfg. operation at 97% accuracy? Can you run a financial services firm with 95% accuracy? NO. NEVER. So the deterministic, old-fashioned computer software ERP will go nowhere. Nowhere at all. LLMs will be good as a top layer on those ERPs to glean insights, nothing more.
[ None can 'train away' hallucinations in a probabilistic LLM model, using larger datasets. You are actually claiming I'll build a dice that lands a 4, or a 6, each time ]
G) Agents aren't magical, humans aren't going anywhere: Multi-step agentic AI is being touted as the final solution where one founder sitting alone can run 100 agents and build an empire. Try doing that once, experience the frequent breakdowns, see the regular edges and new complexities, and you will realize that other than the most mundane of tasks, nothing else will be seamless. Yes, Voice AI agents are good, and many in the developing world are now deploying those, but that's hardly a cutting-edge technology that'll replace all humans.
H) IT and SaaS firms are going nowhere: Ironically, the more AI happens in enterprises, the more will be the need for humans to supervised and orchestrate those bits and pieces of AI, to ensure nothing flies off the rails. The complex software code that Claude and Codex can write only changes the nature of work for the human coders who now have to check the AI code thoroughly for the many edge cases in real world. The nature of IT and SaaS work will change, some companies that can't innovate and adapt will vanish, but many new ones will emerge in their place. (Yes, there'll will be some much-deserved disruption in short-term, and the non-innovating IT firms will have deserved every bit of it)
I) If IT and SaaS are dead, why are AI firms hyping: Ask this simple question - if AI is indeed killing IT and SaaS, then why are AI firms spending massive sums hyping their wares? They need spend nothing and still earn the spoils. But they know the truth.
J) The China angle: Models from China - many of them open-sourced - are getting better and more competitive. Many of them are cheaper, or free (for now). OpenAI complained recently that they are stealing from American models (via "distillation"). Imagine, just imagine - OpenAI that stole entire internet work of creative work is complaining the Chinese are stealing from it. A dacoit crying that thieves broke into his house. Rich. You think these are signs of singularity? Ha! The judicial backlash on stolen content and profiteering off of it hasn't even begun in most jurisdictions.
(now imagine what happens to American LLM-makers when Chinese models gain traction everywhere)
K) Downside of mindless AI already visible: Take just one example: In education everywhere, students, parents and teachers are all realizing that mindless AI use is harming the process of learning, not aiding it. The sensible, guarded and limited way AI should be brought into pedagogy hasn't even been given a proper thought. Students are just doing "cognitive offloading", and turning into non-thinking beings. This is bound to collapse sooner than later. Humans as species don't learn this way - it's a long, tortuous and slow process, always.
L) AI is normal technology: Serious researchers from the AI field have for years argued that AI is being hyped unnecessarily out of proportion, turned into Snake Oil like propositions, and most of AI's predictive powers are anyway not better than that of astrology. AI's ability to talk to use like humans has totally stumped normal people, and anthropomorphism has kicked in. Since no ERP talked to use like a human would, the computer revolution came about without the singularity fears.
M) AI in law and judiciary: The impact will be on the grunt work. It will be cut down substantially. But no judge will outsource their cognition to AI, now will any lawyer. The fact that an LLM can read a complex document fast and summarise it means nothing if it hallucinates. And LLMs will forever hallucinate; that's their structure. (so you'll need humans to sign off on LLM outputs)
N) Enterprise AI's lessons: Every company that has mindlessly gone in on AI has learnt that employees just stopped using it if it didn't adapt to the existing workflows. AI cannot magically alter anything: it can speed things up (with hallucinations), it can generate beautiful stuff (needed or not) and it can help save some time, but the company-to-company needs are so different, it cannot be force-fit on all in one shot. (that is what foundation LLM firms are trying to do). Remember: Enterprise work is not just code. It’s messy data, old legacy systems, compliance needs, multiple integrations, business context, human complexities, and more. Services firms are going nowhere.

O) AI has no solutions for the human situation: Fertility rates everywhere are dropping. Humans are being converted into permanently marketable selves. Consumption comfort has made us soft, and our morality is totally adrift. AI doesn't solve any of this, it just force-multiplies most of it. We built it. It reflects what we are.

5) So what should you do?
a) Read up on AI. Its technical side. How LLMs are created. What they just cannot do. What they can. Why they aren't superhuman at all. Why AI is a good but normal set of technologies.
b) Think why regulated industries (at least 25) cannot hand over their future to AI, LLMs, and GenAI.
c) Check the history of Indian IT and how it kept rebooting itself to suit a new era (from Y2K, to outsourcing, to SaaS backend support, to much more).
d) Check how human societies eventually revolt when artificiality starts overpowering natural human interactions.
e) Be prepared for more hype and nonsense. Sadly, the AI firms won't stop at it at all. They need more humans to subscribe to their paid tiers, and fear seems to be the chosen weapon. Tragic.
[I am subscribed to more than 10 such paid AI tools currently, and know exactly what's good and what's not, and why no singularity is arriving]
f) Adapt your work, and bits of it, to AI tools that can adjust to the workflow well. Let your discretion be supreme.
g) If AI is the shiny new tap, IT is the plumbing behind it.

Remember:
Elon Musk's predictions have mostly gone wrong
Geoffrey Hinton's predictions have gone wrong
Mustafa Suleyman's predictions have gone bust
Yet they keep predicting.

Sad part:
We are living in an age of bullshit. And LLMs are excellent bullshitting machines. The reason the AI Bros are continuing doing so is no one is holding them accountable for their nonstop lies.

But what about AGI:
If AGI is ever built, it won't be by any one company. The technology diffuses rapidly each day. So multiple AGIs in multiple hands. Goes without saying governments will capture (claim) that technology almost immediately. If that day ever arrives, UBI is happening too.

Finally:
Your brain, running on just 20 watts, continues to outthink LLMs fueled by the energy of an entire planet. Never underestimate yourself. And stop falling prey to AI hype.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Tech stack is a footnote. Impact is the headline.

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

@dharmesh The buzzword trap is real, especially for first-time founders. Learned the hard way that customer pain points > trendy positioning. They buy solutions, not labels!

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Went to SF for @ycombinator final interviews in 2017.
Barely remember the conversation but the essence stayed with me.
Was intense and overwhelming as a 1st time founder.
If you're submitting ideas rn, don't overthink it. Most of this only really makes sense when you're in it.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

The way startups are built has shifted quickly.

We're excited about a range of startup ideas for AI-native companies that can now be built faster, cheaper, and with more ambition than ever.

https://t.co/Ms3Vn5Vq7q

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

What was the first language you learned - and what do you mostly “code in” today?

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

Been coding for 14+ years:
Moved from Assembly→C→C#→Java->JS→Python→ Ruby→ now… English (read Cursor).
With every new language, abstractions increased.
Shipping got faster.

Coding was never about syntax...

[Pushp Raj Saurabh @pushprajsaurabh]

It was always about breaking problems down with 1st principles
and good design.
AI takes away the arduous grunt work and lets developers focus on what truly matters.
This might be the best era ever to be a software engineer.
#AI #SoftwareEngineering #Programming #BuildInPublic