01
Cheap intelligence changes psychology.
The cost of asking changes the shape of thought before the model gets smarter.
Cheap Intelligence Usage Anxietya public notebook by Gurudas Bhat
Cheap Intelligence
Expensive Judgment
What remains scarce when thinking gets cheaper?
Essays on AI, ambition, taste, leverage, and the increasingly strange lives of knowledge workers.
In a former life, I was an engineer at Oracle and Intuit. In this one, I am an MBA candidate at IIT Bombay's Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, fresh off a summer internship with Accenture Strategy & Consulting in their Communications and Media vertical. Currently overthinking AI, venture, product, and why smart people keep building Formula One cars for grocery runs.
Working theories
A map of the current obsessions.
02
The tool is not the work.
Harnesses, context, and judgment matter more than the demo video suggests.
The Harness Is the Moat The System That Eats Itself Tsa03
More is not always better.
Context windows, model maximalism, and the comedy of using the most powerful thing available for the least worthy task.
smolgate The Goldilocks Conundrum Formula One Cars for Grocery Runs04
Friction was doing something.
Speed is useful. It also quietly removes the small delays that made thought less sloppy.
What We Lost on the Way to FasterEssays
The public notebook.
Formula One Cars for Grocery Runs
On overbuilt AI workflows, productivity theatre, and why impressive machinery still needs somewhere meaningful to go.
smolgate, or How I Learnt to Be Okay With Smaller Context Windows
On context windows, hoarding, and the fantasy that more memory equals better thought.
The Goldilocks Conundrum for AI Enthusiasts
On model maximalism, capability theatre, and learning when not to call the CEO to decide lunch.
Cheap Intelligence Changes Human Psychology More Than Smarter Intelligence
On token anxiety, abundant retries, and the weird freedom of not treating every prompt like a prayer.
The System That Eats Itself
On context drift, compaction, and why the human still has to hold the telos.
Tsa
On Tibetan monks, sycophantic AI, and why your LLM is too agreeable to be useful.
The Harness Is the Moat
On AI, knowledge work, and a Sunday night in Bangalore that got away from me.
What We Lost on the Way to Faster
On typing, voice input, and the friction that was doing something.
Usage Anxiety
Like range anxiety, but for your thinking.
Hello, world
A short first note on what this place is for, and why a quiet corner of the internet still feels worth making.