Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar) header
Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar) profile picture

Ex @usecorgi YC (S24) Founding engineer @huddle01com @nintee_official | Tinkering with Software, AI agents, early stage ideas and -1 to 0

Remote
Joined May 2015
Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)Photo by Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» (@iponikar)
Built a small library for on-device photo indexing and search on iOS, using Apple's open-source MobileCLIP model. It embeds every photo on the phone, so you can search by meaning. Remote LLMs can query it too, and they get back only text, never the photos github.com/ponikar/picknick.…
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
β€œWhat did you do today??” Me:
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
My best career advice is to just be genuinely interested in what others are doing and be helpful however you can. I also think this is how to be a good human.
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
always start with evals. work from first principles
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How come Muse is still not available in India?
Craziest use-case of Muse that I heard at a dinner event: CTO wanted to get SOC2 done. Gets muse to reach out to 6 vendors that target startups of his scale. All of them interested. His Muse reviewed each of them, their quality / outcomes, negotiated and got him a deal that beat the market.
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
Underrated life advice: Have a Bad-Day Protocol. Go for a walk. Eat something clean. Hit a workout. Take a long shower. Get to bed early. Whatever. You don’t need to solve every problem when you’re at your worst. You need a few moves that stop a bad day from becoming a bad week.
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What’s going on?
We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math. It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training. We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧡 Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
LLM was given weights explicitly as text in prompt and used code/forward passes (per authors' logs) to ablate Qwen looping direction, a known thinking-mode issue per model card. Primarily fixed repetition in that mode, not general 'natively' improving weights/math. rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-sp… github.com/RikiyaT/lm_und… huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-0… huggingface.co/RikiyaT/Qwen3.…
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
πŸ‘‹ I'll be in London during the third week of November and would love to meet engineers and builders. If you're building agents, AI infra, or developer platforms, let's grab a coffee and swap notes on what you're learning and what isn't working yet. DM me if you're around
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
When it comes to hiring, it’s easier to tame a reckless hustler than it is to instill that dawg in someone
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The algorithm is optimising the AI. AI is optimising the algorithm. - HBO Silicon Valley
Seeing this makes the end-state clearer to me: code that can't be read by humans, run on machines that humans can't access, via inaccessible APIs, trained on data that humans didn't create. LLMs are starting to get really good at manipulating mostly-opaque-to-humans code (see: their improved ability to reverse engineer machine code/assembly). Additionally, folks are accessing more-and-more of their LLMs in cloud-based environments without ever actually interacting with an LLM API (myself included). I think it's going to become increasingly likely that the end state is one in which you ask an agentic company to produce some result and it does it via [some system completely opaque to humans] and produces [some output in a format that humans are unable to interpret]. It makes me wonder if our current state of competing LLMs cross-training on each other will eventually become literally impossible (not just logistically so) when they become fully self-recursive and are producing output that even other LLMs can't understand, let alone humans. I think we're in something of a golden period here where humans are still capable of understanding how things work and how things are run (shell commands! python! node.js!) but it's going to quickly become irrelevant. We're already past the previous high-point where we were able to see reasoning traces for the top-level LLMs. I'm skeptical that open models will ever get to this point as the economics are working against them (I suspect that they will always need human-generated training materials in one form or another). But it does make me wonder if the upper-echelon companies will end up converging into this high-level "black box that produces outputs" singularity of sorts. This has been hitting home for me lately as I've been using Claude Projects in a cloud-based environment where I can't see transcripts, look at the machine it's running on, nor even know what commands it's running. I don't even know what languages its writing its code in. We're just a couple steps away from code being completely irrelevant.
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
A compiler is better at turning c code into assembly than you are. But does it mean the compiler is smarter than you? The same holds true for LLMs. They are a future kind of, general compiler
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
Builders are in demand Job postings, past 12 months: - Engineering +30% - Software dev +26% - Manufacturing +13% Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
The AI jobs panic peaked in May and has faded fast since: - News reports on AI job loss are down ~65%, back to year-ago levels - Layoff announcements that cite AI are down ~90%, near the lowest of the year Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
We’re at a billion tool calls a month at Composio. We're hiring an APM in the integrations pod to contribute to taking that 10x further. Someone early in their career who learns fast, keeps getting better with agents, and gets their hands dirty when the agents can’t. Bangalore, in person. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/composio/64…
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Life is too short guys. Don't wait for the perfect moment.
i read this at least once a month.
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
Replying to @_jaydeepkarale
Nothing cryptic about it. You are the engineer. You are responsible. You must ensure that all quality gates are met while productivity remains high. Just like before. Just like always.
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
Waiting for my plane at the airport like I am in Succession (my seat is 31F)
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
Me at a meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with me
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Darshan Ponikar πŸ§‘πŸΌβ€πŸ’» retweeted
the moat is how much energy you have
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