Vishnu Gopal

Vishnu Gopal

@vishnugopal.com

Programming/engineering nerd, SciFi & anime nut, hopeless romantic, #ChaoticGood

13 followers20 following33 posts

Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.com

Really enjoyed Reacher. It’s the right blend of over the top action, humor and bravado for me. The last season was the goriest of em though.

Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.com

Trying out @exe.dev and it's so cool! Built a website for my wife in about 10 minutes. Easy for her to edit too since it's wired up to ChatGPT. You just ask it to make changes and it does. There's also something magical about executing commands like this: `ssh exe.dev share set-public <vm-name>`

Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.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?

vishnugopal.comAugmented AbstractionsI’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.
Vishnu Gopal
@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 :)

vishnugopal.comLearning 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 
Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.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!

vishnugopal.comHow to Build an Education Agent Using FlueIn 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.
Vishnu Gopal
@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.

Vishnu Gopal
@vishnugopal.com

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…

vishnugopal.comUsing Space for Hyper Key Shortcuts on macOSTLDR: 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&hellip;
Vishnu Gopal
@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!

vishnugopal.comDraftflow: a Collaborative CRDT-aware Editor AITLDR: I find current AI-enabled editing interactions to be a bit of before-after magic. You click a button &amp; 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&hellip;
Vishnu Gopal
@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...

vishnugopal.comA Simple TypeScript Implementation of Private Information RetrievalTLDR: 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…

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