Tanmay Patil

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor”

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

“Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.” - Yuval

[Guillermo Rauch @rauchg]

Unclear if a durable trend, but CEOs and CTOs are back to coding with a fury, thanks to coding agents.

I have public company CEOs sliding into my DMs (and “InMail”) telling me about falling in love with shipping software again thanks to Claude Code and Vercel.

“Dream accounts” that we always wanted to work with, where in the past the C-suite would hardly understand the infrastructure until much later in the game.

Coding agents are the ultimate PLG-fication of the enterprise. Bad, legacy software can’t hide anymore. The stack that works is self-evident to the entire organization, from intern to CEO.

[Akshay Kothari @akothari]

You can use AI to cut costs. You can also use AI to raise your ambition.

Too many people focus on the first. More people should be thinking about the second.

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

I got chills reading through this because it may sound like a paranoid person fear-mongering but if at all you've had a taste of AI streamlining your work, you know what he's talking about.

And it's a little scary. At the same time, I'm hopeful we will find a way to adapt.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

I've been feeling pretty much similar of late.

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

It's a weird time. I am filled with wonder and also a profound sadness.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so.

Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy...but disoriented.

At the same time, something I spent my early career building (social networks) was being created by lobster-agents. It's all a bit silly...but if you zoom out, it's kind of indistinguishable from humans on the larger internet.

So both the form and function of my early career are now produced by AI.

I am happy but also sad and confused.

If anything, this whole period is showing me what it is like to be human again.

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Many entrepreneurs keep pitching me the idea of habit changing app.

Well, I tried it (with Nintee) and it realized it'll never work!

The problem is that a digital app has an insignificant amount of leverage over a person's life, especially to get them to do things that they'e not naturally motivated to do like exercise or healthy diet.

People live in a bubble of influences (family, peers, culture environment) and such influences matter more than your app's notification.

What all such apps battle against is millions of years of our evolved tendencies! Even real human coaches fail at behavior change, so what's an app going to do?

There's a reason Instagram and 10 minute delivery works, but habit coaching and weight loss apps fail.

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

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[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the only engine we’ve seen that creates value. Create first, and distribute second. Reverse the order, and we distribute scarcity. Helps no one.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

“Every hour spent recreating Salesforce or Workday is an hour not spent building the proprietary capabilities that actually move the business forward.”

This is one of the more essential reason why most companies are not going to have AI clone their system of record apps and manage them all themselves.

Every project you take on is a tradeoff against some other important project. You “hire” software because someone else has already solved the problem for you. And that problem has a long tail of dependencies, like security, maintenance, system upgrades, and on and on.

AI will certainly be used to build competitors in all these categories, in some cases adding pricing pressure, but more likely just expanding the market sizes to reach more businesses via vertical or segment expansion.

But what’s most likely is we will use AI to build all the *other* software that doesn’t exist yet. Which will incidentally be about 10X more software than we have already. IT teams will be able to finally go solve the long tail of requests that come in through the business for custom apps, integrations, and automations.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The real moats in 2025: specific workflows, proprietary data with real switching costs, distribution, and UX that makes AI disappear into the job-to-be-done.

Simultaneously: we are early (only a % are using AI properly) so this is an amazing time to start a startup.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

It’s 10x easier to build software now than it was 5 years ago.

It’s only slightly easier to build software people want to use.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

A hilarious fact of First Principles Thinking is that almost no one ever does it in practice, but you’d be smart to cite First Principles Thinking in meetings because it is incredibly effective ammunition to convince any group to go along with whatever your conclusion is.

[Coffee with One 🇺🇸 @coffeewithone]

I'm 24, dropped out of Duke, joined YC, and bet everything on a startup. Here's what actually happens when you go all-in:

1. Your co-founder relationship matters more than your product:
You can pivot products. You can't pivot people. Most startups die from founder breakups, not market failure. Choose your co-founder like you'd choose a spouse, you'll spend more time with them anyway.

2. Nobody cares about your startup except you:
Your friends are being polite. Your family doesn't understand it. Even your customers barely think about you. You're obsessed. Everyone else has their own life. This loneliness is the actual job.

3. Runway is a countdown to your personal failure:
Every month that clock ticks down isn't just money. it's proof you haven't figured it out yet. The stress is less about going broke and more about confronting whether you're actually good enough.

4. Your first 10 customers will lie to you:
They'll say they love it. They'll promise to pay more. They'll ghost you next month. Early customers are either friends doing you a favor or tire-kickers. Real validation doesn't come until customer 50.

5. Hiring too fast kills more startups than hiring too slow:
You panic, hire someone mediocre, spend 6 months managing them poorly, fire them awkwardly, and burn $100K+ in the process. Better to be understaffed and stressed than overstaffed and broke.

6. Your burn rate is the only number that matters:
Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Runway is reality. You can survive slow growth. You can't survive running out of money. Every dollar you spend is oxygen you just burned.

7. The best features are the ones you don't build:
Every feature is debt. Support debt. Maintenance debt. Complexity debt. The companies that win aren't the ones with the most features, they're the ones that said no to everything except the one thing that matters.

8.Profitability is a choice, not a milestone:
You can be profitable at $50K ARR if you want to be. Most founders choose to burn cash chasing growth because it feels like progress. It's not. It's just expensive.

9. Your competition doesn't matter until it does:
You'll obsess over competitors daily. Then realize customers don't even know they exist. Then one day a competitor will eat your biggest deal and you'll realize you were unprepared. There's no winning, just different kinds of paranoia.

10. The day you launch is the least important day:
You'll spend months planning launch day. It'll come and go. You'll get some Twitter engagement. Then nothing changes. Building a company is 1,000 boring Tuesdays, not one epic launch.

11. Every advisor will give you contradictory advice:
"Move fast" vs "be strategic." "Focus" vs "diversify." "Raise money" vs "bootstrap." They're all right. They're all wrong. Nobody knows. Including you. Especially you.

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

Skill issue.

This was design strategically with dual-purpose functionality offering a valid path while ALSO improving pedestrian health.

Path 1: Designed to improve balance.
Path 2: Designed to improve plyometrics via jumping.
Path 3: Designed to encourage leanness/slim belly.

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

What Indian footpaths are for in descending order of importance:

1. Power junction boxes
2. Electrical poles
3. Hoardings
4. Food stalls
5. Darshini overflow
6. Parked vehicles
7. Trees
8. Potted plants
9. Pedestrians
10. Parents with strollers/differently-abled in wheelchairs

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

"AI isn't replacing radiologists" good article

Expectation: rapid progress in image recognition AI will delete radiology jobs (e.g. as famously predicted by Geoff Hinton now almost a decade ago). Reality: radiology is doing great and is growing.

There are a lot of imo naive predictions out there on the imminent impact of AI on the job market. E.g. a ~year ago, I was asked by someone who should know better if I think there will be any software engineers still today. (Spoiler: I think we're going to make it). This is happening too broadly.

The post goes into detail on why it's not that simple, using the example of radiology:

- the benchmarks are nowhere near broad enough to reflect actual, real scenarios.
- the job is a lot more multifaceted than just image recognition.
- deployment realities: regulatory, insurance and liability, diffusion and institutional inertia.
- Jevons paradox: if radiologists are sped up via AI as a tool, a lot more demand shows up.

I will say that radiology was imo not among the best examples to pick on in 2016 - it's too multi-faceted, too high risk, too regulated. When looking for jobs that will change a lot due to AI on shorter time scales, I'd look in other places - jobs that look like repetition of one rote task, each task being relatively independent, closed (not requiring too much context), short (in time), forgiving (the cost of mistake is low), and of course automatable giving current (and digital) capability. Even then, I'd expect to see AI adopted as a tool at first, where jobs change and refactor (e.g. more monitoring or supervising than manual doing, etc). Maybe coming up, we'll find better and broader set of examples of how this is all playing out across the industry.

About 6 months ago, I was also asked to vote if we will have less or more software engineers in 5 years. Exercise left for the reader.

Full post (the whole The Works in Progress Newsletter is quite good):
https://t.co/ON3GwlI3mi

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

Looks stunning!

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇨🇳 CHINA’S DRONE SHOWS ARE GETTING SERIOUSLY INTENSE

Source: @Middle_Eastern0

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

Google's back with a bang.

[Deedy @deedydas]

🚨 This was the BEST Google I/O that I can remember.

Google launched over 12 different insane things.

Here is every single one of the launches and the best tweets about them:

1/12

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

@soorajchandran_ Massage chair

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

@chiragbarjatya Grab works everywhere. And I have actually seen the drivers clean their cars after the trip ends more than once.

Average sedan you get via grab is very clean and well maintained.

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

@sundarpichai Yes, please

[Tanmay Patil @tanmay_gp]

@pranavhrn 😂