A small coastal town in Tamil Nadu. We made the move — Sripriya, our daughter and son, my mother, and me. I used to be woken by crows in Bangalore. Here it is peacocks. I will take the peacock.
The bioregion is slower, quieter, and more alive than I expected. Still finding my feet in it. Still grateful every morning.
June and July were lighter on screens — travelling, workshops, more rooms than tabs. I took a deliberate break from Claude and the daily building rhythm; the quiet stretch in the inklings is exactly that. August is the return — the site's night-sky redesign and Antara's new corner are what coming back looked like.
A family circuit through Madhya Pradesh — out of Balaghat, where my in-laws are from: Amarkantak, where the Narmadā is born; a rained-out Jabalpur; and up to Pachmarhi, where a framed 1912 Survey of India map on a hotel wall would not let me go. It came home as a small map corner on this site — the sheet, recreated, and a family atlas that lights up wherever we stand. The working-through is in an inkling.
Technology Director at Travelopia — leading the AI transformation across the business. The work is real, the stakes are high, and the colleagues who are doing it with me make it worth every long call.
Also deepening something with Chris — we want to write about what we've learned together. chrisandsree.blog is where that starts.
Three phases behind me — developer, consultant, global technology director. Now at a crossroads, reinventing again. The question I keep sitting with: what does it mean to be a builder in a world where AI builds? This site, and the workflow behind it, is my current answer. Everything I ship now — sites, tools, essays — runs through an agentic workflow built on Claude Code; a real shift in how I work. How I build →
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This site — essays, the bhava series, inklings, builder conversations, signals, a /now and a /how. Newest: a full design refresh — the Panchāṅga night-sky system, Newsreader and a mono data voice, drawn and shipped with Claude in a single long day; Prompts — working prompts at stable URLs instead of screenshots; and Antara grown into the astrology corner — the letter plus a library, including One Sky, Three Frames, an interactive explainer of why the three chart shapes are one sky. Newest experiment: Let's build — websites from a conversation, for friends and the people they send my way, with five live sites as proof. And newly grown: a library shelf of everything on the site, a homepage that deals one piece a day by the day's planetary ruler, three working prompts at stable URLs, and a map corner born of the Madhya Pradesh trip.
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aila.fun betaAn AI writing pipeline — react ✍ to a thought in WhatsApp and Claude drafts a full article from it. Writing that starts as a gesture.
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Resourcing ManagerA staffing and cost-forecast tool I'm building to replace a SaaS we'd outgrown. Node, Supabase, magic-link sign-in. Private for now.
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A macOS app I'm building to test and diagnose a wifi network — signal, speed, and what's actually going wrong. A small tool for a daily annoyance.
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livinginauroville.in betaSolved a personal pain — finding relevant events in the bioregion without drowning in WhatsApp. Now sharing it. With Vikram and Griselda.
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A space for senior leaders to pause and lead differently. With Sunil Rawlani, my ISB coach — who brought the word chetana into the room.
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A Jyotish learning companion built alongside Vikram Devatha's Astrology 101 course. Just moved to its own domain. Dedicated to all the masters who shaped the way I see the sky.
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A dream my partner had but never had time to build. Finally, love made time.
The kit I'm working through right now. Claude is the centre — chat, Cowork, and Claude Code; everything I ship runs through it. Codex and Paperclip, both just opened and still finding their place. Gemini for images, presentations, and documents; Midjourney when an image needs more art than answer.
Underneath it all: Ngrok for tunnels, Loom for showing instead of telling, Supabase and Firebase holding the backends, and GitHub holding everything else.
The Bhava series — personal essays mapped to the twelve houses of Jyotish — is whole: all twelve houses written, body to release, about 19,000 words of one life looked at twelve ways. The chart stays a work in progress — second visits to some houses are already taking shape. Open the twelve matchboxes →
The series is an attempt to understand a life through the lens of the twelve bhavas — not as astrology, but as a framework for honest looking.
And Antara — a fortnightly letter written with the Jyotish peer group, reading the sky twice: astronomy for ground, Jyotish as primary. Two editions out, a third in draft. The letter & the library →
Alongside the long essays, Inklings — shorter pieces and wonder-sessions, written quickly when something catches. Recent ones on programming languages having passports, and on a state that keeps arriving in my life through people. Read the inklings →
And a smaller experiment — Unedited: one raw thought carried through three stages, from a voice memo to the finished piece, with the original audio left in. A page about showing the seams. See it →
Jyotish — Year One of Astrology 101 with Vikram Devatha is complete (28 June). The batch, the year, and the song we made of it are at The chart of us. The houses, the planets, the slow grammar of a chart — still the deepest well I draw from.
Conscious leadership — in an ongoing group with Sunil Rawlani. The Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Stoicism. What it means to lead from the inside out.
And the tools themselves — currently exploring Google Antigravity, and how agentic IDEs change what a builder's day actually looks like.
Recording an unhurried podcast — slow, on camera, on the record. Recent conversations: with Venky Chandragowri on the long innings — Paolo Maldini, a pen-written resume, and AI as a partner you can be vulnerable with; with Rajesh Thiagarajan on strong opinions loosely held, and abhaya — the absence of fear; with Robin Dhanwani on going slow to go fast in an AI-first design world; with Suresh Harikrishnan on building Peach and Dexy with AI; with Sriram Narayan on the software lifecycle now; with Anil Grovor on the inner microscope where yoga therapy and Jyotish meet; and with Kanika Kohli on AI-era leadership and why it's okay to not know.
More at sreebalakrishnan.in/watch.