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jmathai

5,625 karma · joined May 6, 2009

https://jaisenmathai.com/

Current projects:

https://trysojourn

https://getpreppy.app

https://trywireshark.com

Personal sites:

https://github.com/jmathai

https://github.com/photo

https://linkedin.com/in/jaisenmathai

Contact:

jaisen@jmathai.com

submissionscomments
jmathai··on Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis
I’ll definitely try this out. I have a Claude project for our home and many chat conversations about my lawn.

What I don’t know yet is if the DIY I’m doing with the help of Claude is going to materialize into a lush lawn.

It has me doing pre-emergent spray, broad leaf weed killers, and moss killer.

It’s a lot of work and I’m sure there is a much better UX than saved chats.

jmathai··on Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring: Built together, designed for the future
If you’re going to run your own NAS then consider swapping Google Photos out with Immich.

I know it’s not the question you asked but I feel not enough people know about it as an option and it’s really as good as Google Photos.

jmathai··on Claude, Teach Me Something
I do something similar. When I have an errand to run, I ask Claude to draft a detailed explanation of something I’m interested in which would be the amount of my driving time when read aloud.

Then I have it read it to me aloud on my drive.

jmathai··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
Agree. I didn’t mean stronger in that sense. I meant how it naturally extends to Claude Design, Claude CoWork, Claude Code.

ChatGPT is too awkward to do that with.

jmathai··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all).

My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.

jmathai··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.

I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!

jmathai··on Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…

Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?

It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.

jmathai··on Shunning AI is the human choice
> The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.

It's a cute thought that big tech wants our help to shape artificial intelligence.

jmathai··on We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.

Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.

jmathai··on Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results
I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".

The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.

jmathai··on Claude for Small Business
I am on the board of a non profit and Claude has enabled workflows that just would never have happened. In 1 week I've done the following for them:

1. Automated ingestion of hand-written tuition scholarship applications into Google Sheets. Near flawless OCR to structured spreadsheet ingestion and image extraction.

2. Revamped the website completely from a simple static website to a dynamic one which accepts donations (started with Claude Design, handed off to Claude Code). Old: https://csmforchrist.com --- New: https://stage.csmforchrist.com

3. Included sponsorship applicant pages (from #1) to let supporters read profiles and choose who to support through the website (this used to be a fully phone/email process before)

As an aside, it feels great to use AI for something that improves people's lives today.

jmathai··on The vi family
Learning how to use a proper IDE is a change in workflow.

I never made that switch. The muscle memory of 2 decades of using a software is under appreciated.

For me, it is about preference for what to optimize for.

jmathai··on Gemini API File Search is now multimodal
My non technical wife knows both ChatGPT and Anthropic (admittedly, because of me) but doesn’t know Gemini. This is amazing to me.

Surely she has seen Gemini in Google search but even her use of that is plummeting.

Google has so much revenue that they’ll be around for a long time. But I feel they are fumbling the opportunity with AI. Even in corporate, where we have Gemini. The conversation is fully around Claude. No one talks about Gemini.

jmathai··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
I advise a medical non profit and we ran a series of tests against cases doctors input to our system looking for specialist recommendations.

Our findings found that gpt-5-mini performed better than gpt-5, sonnet 4 and medgemma.

I think these studies are very hard to accurately score. But in any case, AI seems to do a very good job compared to humans. Unsurprising, really.

jmathai··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home
That’s pretty cool - I hadn’t seen it.

This is the approach I used and tried to make a product from. I’m not pursuing that anymore but sharing for folks who want to run wire without dealing with drywall.

https://trywireshark.com

(yes I’m familiar with the other well established Wireshark)

jmathai··on Anthropic's Claude Desktop App Installs Undisclosed Native Messaging Bridge
That’s very cool - did not know about that.

Listening for commands to run seems similarly dangerous as having a proxy installed!

jmathai··on Anthropic's Claude Desktop App Installs Undisclosed Native Messaging Bridge
I only learned about Native Messaging this week.

I've been hacking away at a browser-based tool that uses anthropic APIs on the backend. But what I really want is for the browser to talk to my local claude becuase I have MCPs, skills, network access for a bunch of things.

I started with a little proxy installed on my computer that the browser can call but knew it would never pass any security review. The alternative I didn't originally know about was Native Messaging.

It's a fairly benign way to let a browser talk to and execute commands on your computer. But doing it without disclosing is, I agree, very bad.

(tool I'm hacking away at needs to talk to local claude and acli: https://withlattice.com)

jmathai··on Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud
This has been great for me too. Every feature starts and completes with /gh-issue <issue number>.

Every issue is created with /spec and a conversation with a human. Once the spec is materialized as an issue it’s sufficient for an agent to implement.

Everything is documented. It’s amazing.

jmathai··on The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment
Both things can be true.

AI can help you in the near term and harm you in the long term.

I think the more people use AI the more their view shifts from the former to the latter.

jmathai··on Codex for almost everything
After 25 years of writing code in vim, I've found myself managing a bunch of terminal sessions and trying to spot issues in pull requests.

I wouldn't have thought this could be the case and it took me actually embracing it before I was fully sold.

Maybe not a popular opinion but I really do believe...

- code quality as we previously understood will not be a thing in 3-5 years

- IDEs will face a very sharp decline in use

jmathai··on AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.

Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.

jmathai··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Yup. Makes a lot of sense.
jmathai··on AI for American-produced cement and concrete
It's legitimate? I was like wtf until I saw the date and then closed the tab.
jmathai··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Is it that the tickets are too verbose?
jmathai··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
Yup, the manager gets implicit credit for the work their team does. In most cases, deservedly so. I don't see why it should be any different for engineers using LLMs as "direct reports". Not all engineers will be the same level of "good" with LLM tools so the better you are (as with any other skill as well) the more credit you would receive.
jmathai··on How I'm Productive with Claude Code
This is basically the same workflow I've come to adopt. I don't use any "pre-built" skills, mine are actually still .md files in the .claude/command/ folder because that's when I started. The workflow is so good, I'm the bottleneck.

I've started to use git worktrees to parallelize my work. I spend so much time waiting...why not wait less on 2 things? This is not a solved problem in my setup. I have a hard time managing just two agents and keeping them isolated. But again, I'm the bottleneck. I think I could use 5 agents if my brain were smarter........or if the tools were better.

I am also a PM by day and I'm in Claude Code for PM work almost 90% of my day.

jmathai··on The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it
I buy it. SaaS doesn’t have to go extinct for this to be true.

I’m building an app and many things I’d normally pay for like metrics and emailing I can just do myself.

A friend has a law firm employing 100+ people and they are building so many internal tools they would otherwise be delaying or paying salesforce consultants for.

jmathai··on Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs
I did not - I wasn't trying to evade - I was just being lazy.

I do believe whoever the font owners are paying just scrape the HTML and CSS looking for patterns matching their font.

jmathai··on Which jobs are most vulnerable to AI?
> if it only has 2% chance of hallucinating

I want people to have jobs.

Setting that aside, it is dependent on error rate of human surgeons, right?

jmathai··on Font Smuggler – Copy hidden brand fonts into Google Docs
Received DMCA takedown notices for a paid font I used for my wife’s interior design website that she liked but we didn’t pay for because…I’m lazy.

I was surprised to receive the DMCA (it is hosted on GitHub Pages). I ignored the emails because…I’m lazy.

They (GitHub) eventually took down the repository (and site). So I swapped to another font and I don’t think my wife noticed.

I think all of this was still easier than probably paying for the font!

Lesson of the story? Don’t underestimate the impact of laziness on your potential customers.

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