Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.com
Programming/engineering nerd, SciFi & anime nut, hopeless romantic, #ChaoticGood
More than 1.5 crores to port a whole JS runtime to a different language. What will be the cost 5 years from now? bun.com/blog/bun-in-...
Rewriting Bun in Rust
Why & how we rewrote Bun from Zig to Rust
bun.com
The "A" in AI should stand for augmented, not artificial. I sketch out Fawkes—a take on Chad Fowler's Phoenix Architecture, where code is no longer the source of truth but a regenerated artifact. Curious what other engineers think: when the spells become prose, what's left that's uniquely ours?
Augmented Abstractions
I’ve always liked to think of the A in AI as augmented instead of artificial. Humans plus AI instead of versus. This is hardly controversial if you look at it in terms of any technology invention: cars made horse buggies obsolete. EVs and solar panels are making petrol engines go the way of the dodo. And in every case, the buggy drivers suffered and had to reinvent themselves, but the human quality of life improved.
vishnugopal.com
Part 2 is up: I took the same Flue-powered tutoring agent from a terminal UI to a browser UI without rewriting the agent loop. The interesting bits are what the new paradigm allows: natural UI, figures in agent explanations, but still the same agent under the hood :)
Learning using Agents (a web version this time)
The problem I've been interested in is this: if you have content or principles that you'd like to learn from a book, is it possible to build an interactive agent that can help you grok that content easier? In Part 1 I built a Socratic programming tutor as a CLI agent on Flue. It ended on a dare. The tutor was a terminal app — an
vishnugopal.com
Very impressive presentation from Apple. They're not building frontier models, but they're clearly up there as the best platform to deploy AI models & apps: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpwj...
Inside Apple Intelligence and Xcode: Special Presentation | WWDC26
YouTube video by Apple Developer
youtube.com
I built an AI programming tutor that works like Claude Code in reverse: it opens a file in your editor, asks you to edit it, and questions you about what you learned. One-on-one tutoring beats classroom teaching by two standard deviations. We just could never afford it at scale. Now we can!
How to Build an Education Agent Using Flue
In 1984, Benjamin Bloom published a finding that has haunted education ever since: students tutored one-on-one performed two standard deviations better than students in a conventional classroom. The average tutored kid beat 98% of the untutored ones. The catch—the reason it's called the 2 Sigma Problem—is that one-on-one tutoring never scaled. We've known the best way to teach for forty years and could never afford it.
vishnugopal.com
Watched Avatar. The story arc is mostly just the same, including the eventual deus ex machina intervention of Eywa at the end. But the visuals, man. Just a treat.
Using Space for Hyper Key Shortcuts on macOS TLDR: I've rebound the space key so that when held it behaves like a combo of Ctrl+Option+Cmd+Shift (the Hyper key) using kanata, and then bound Space+letter combinations using Raycast to launch and switch between apps instantly. Why? Once in a while I…
Using Space for Hyper Key Shortcuts on macOS
TLDR: I've rebound the space key so that when held it behaves like a combo of Ctrl+Option+Cmd+Shift (the Hyper key) using kanata, and then bound Space+letter combinations using Raycast to launch and switch between apps instantly. Why? Once in a while I make a change to my workflow that feels like it's worth blogging about. This time, I was inspired by keyboard workflows that primarily seem to come from the Linux world…
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 26-28 2025 Last weeks: trip to Japan, Chronicle news, and links.
Weekly Notes 26-28 2025
Last weeks: trip to Japan, Chronicle news, and links.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 24 & 25/2025 Last week: switching back to Cursor AI, Alapuzha Gymkhana, Path to Transcendence & the Japan visa.
Weekly Notes 24 & 25/2025
Last week: switching back to Cursor AI, Alapuzha Gymkhana, Path to Transcendence & the Japan visa.
vishnugopal.com
Hey folks, Chronicle is launching today on Product Hunt. It's a pretty cool way to go from prompt to slide. www.producthunt.com/products/chr... The best way I can describe it is Cursor for Slides, and just like tab-completion is the primary UI for Cursor, Remix is how Chronicle does AI.
Chronicle: Cursor for Slides - Stunning presentations with AI. No design skills required | Product Hunt
Chronicle combines AI with taste to help you go from raw thoughts to polished presentations. Designed for serious work: Start with templates, create with AI workflows, and collaborate with your team t...
producthunt.com
Weekly Notes 20/2025 Last week: migrating vishnugopal.com, book quotes, reading glasses & AI and React stuff.
Weekly Notes 20/2025
Last week: migrating vishnugopal.com, book quotes, reading glasses & AI and React stuff.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 19/2025 Last week: Thunderbolts, visiting temples, discussing the war with friends, and working on features while managing health and diet.
Weekly Notes 19/2025
Last week: Thunderbolts, visiting temples, discussing the war with friends, and working on features while managing health and diet.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 18/2025 Last week: a houseboat trip, impending launch at Chronicle, a blog transition plan & personal fitness progress.
Weekly Notes 18/2025
Last week: a houseboat trip, impending launch at Chronicle, a blog transition plan & personal fitness progress.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 17/2025 Last week: two movies, editing Indian skin tones, Nordic design, and an old game made new.
Weekly Notes 17/2025
Last week: two movies, editing Indian skin tones, Nordic design, and an old game made new.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 16/2025 Last week: Talekat, visit to Jatayu Park, Pravinkoodu shapu & side projects.
Weekly Notes 16/2025
Last week: Talekat, visit to Jatayu Park, Pravinkoodu shapu & side projects.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 15/2025 Las week: family from north India, XState musings, small world adventures, and getting fish.
Weekly Notes 15/2025
Las week: family from north India, XState musings, small world adventures, and getting fish.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 14/2025 Last week: reflections on language learning, Achan's birthday, a Beatles' visit, Rikuoh, and the kutty thevangu.
Weekly Notes 14/2025
Last week: reflections on language learning, Achan's birthday, a Beatles' visit, Rikuoh, and the kutty thevangu.
vishnugopal.com
Weekly Notes 13/2025 Last week: new job at Chronicle, workouts and diet, photography experiments, and a couple of movies.
Weekly Notes 13/2025
Last week: new job at Chronicle, workouts and diet, photography experiments, and a couple of movies.
vishnugopal.com
I built an AI editor called Draftflow that works more like "another person in the room" in a collaborative environment. There is a video in the post for folks who don't want to read!
Draftflow: a Collaborative CRDT-aware Editor AI
TLDR: I find current AI-enabled editing interactions to be a bit of before-after magic. You click a button & wham: your entire text changes. I built an AI editor called Draftflow that works more like "another person in the room" in a collaborative environment. There is a video below in case you don't want to read much. The Problem: Gen AI-enabled Corrections…
vishnugopal.com
I built an AI cowriter and director called Coweave to help anybody write interactive fiction, a task that until now required some knowhow of programming.
Coweave: writing interactive fiction with an AI cowriter
I built an AI cowriter and director called Coweave to help anybody write interactive fiction, a task that until now required some knowhow of programming.
vishnugopal.com
I learnt about Apple's new Live Caller ID lookup feature last month, and I built out a simple implementation of that in TypeScript called sharded-seal-lookup. vishnugopal.com/2024/11/17/a...
A Simple TypeScript Implementation of Private Information Retrieval
TLDR: I learnt about Apple’s new Live Caller ID lookup feature last month, and I built out a simple implementation of that in TypeScript called sharded-seal-lookup. This post explains how the…
vishnugopal.com
Really like the @domain naming here for your ID if you own a domain. Wish Mastodon had the same thing.