Harshal Gajjar / blog

Updated September 2026 Thanks to hungryhobbit on Hacker News for pointing out that the numbers in the original version of this post had gone stale.

The intuition is clean: hand a company a technology that makes work faster and cheaper, and the output gets faster and cheaper.

Git is one of the best pieces of software ever written.

There's an old puzzle about why water, which you'd die without, costs almost nothing, while a diamond, which does nothing for you, costs a fortune.

There's a split forming in how people use software, and it's easy to mislabel.

For twenty years the laptop was where work happened because work was typing.

SSH was designed in 1995.

When people switch from modify-in-place to regenerate-from-scratch, the question of how you keep quality up comes back fast.

LLMs are built on one view of language: predict the next token from the previous ones.

A self-driving car has a problem no human driver has: everyone on the road knows it will yield.

Most of the production agent work I do isn't really about the agent.

back from a TAG weekend. neversink in the rain — 162 ft of free hang, water sheeting down the cliff face the whole descent. nothing else in the week feels heavy after that.

I sat a 10-day silent retreat in 2025.

8+ years into Mathematica and I still find a built-in I didn't know about every week. the language is fractal — there's always one more layer of "wait, that's a single function?"

At Shram in 2024 we were the 800th Jira competitor.

old la honda → west alpine → pescadero loop. 78 mi, 6500 ft. the descent off haskins is the closest a road gets to feeling like a pipe.

A forward-deployed engineer is not a consultant.

reading: "The Beginning of Infinity" (deutsch, again), "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" (kleppmann, for the third time), and the SWE-bench papers. one book per attention budget.

Today I'm sixteen years into writing code.

first trip into Guardian with the SFBC grotto. tight breakdown, then it opens into a room you don't expect from the entrance. cave geometry is the best argument against intuition i've ever found.