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Posts by Gaurav Makhecha

Originally published on LinkedIn.

Browser extension popup showing a reading list with 215 saved items, copy as Markdown and page tools.

I stopped trusting Chrome extensions. So I built my own with AI

One popup, only the things I actually use - GDPR banners gone. Feeds hidden on YouTube, X and LinkedIn. Save to reading list, copy an article as Markdown, JSON formatter. Nothing new. All of this already exists in the store. The difference is I can read every line of mine. Small tools for yourself are the easiest AI win today. Try it. PS - yes, 215 items in my reading list 😅

AIEngineering
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A hand holds a Starbucks iced coffee with whipped cream and a green straw in front of an iron fence.

Imagine a machine counts your stock for you

Then you count it all again bcs you can't trust what it said. That was the reality at Starbucks. They put computer vision in 11k+ stores to track inventory. Every wrong scan, the staff had to catch and fix by hand. Two counts instead of one. So they scrapped it and went back to the old way. Here's the thing - AI didn't fail here. It was handed a job it wasn't ready for, without the skill to make it work. 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐚…

AIRetail
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Stacked bar chart showing monthly cloud service usage from March to June, with totals dropping sharply each month.

DevOps with AI to save 💲

One of the biggest ROI things that happened against our investment in Claude Code subscriptions is this one. A few detailed sessions to share all the details + access, and then seeing these powerful models going through the logs + reports and giving you immediate actionable steps is a wonderful experience. We have been able to save a huge amount in terms of cloud costs. It can help with security and performance…

AIDevOps
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Lumen finding card showing question pass rates: nearly all fail without context, majority pass with business context. Lumen cost card stating a complex business question costs about one cent, with cheaper, equally accurate and faster results.

You shouldn't choose AI models by vibes. Measure

For Lumen, we built an evaluation harness that runs real business questions through the assistant, executes the generated query against a real data source, and checks that the answer is actually correct - then scores every leading model on accuracy, cost, and speed, side by side. **Learning** Accuracy came from context, not the priciest model. In our AI data assistant, every answer is measured against ground truth…

AITestingProduct / SaaS
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Gaurav pulls a surprised face in a selfie taken behind a guardrail above a green river valley.

Bad people are using GenAI

Just as most experts have been expecting. Recently, 75% of auto lenders reported that identified fraud increased over the prior 12 months. A fake borrower with a made-up credit history, a real Social Security number and a believable employment profile. Loan given and then no recovery 🫥 And similar is happening in other industries too. So, for all the companies that are not in a hurry to start using AI, now the…

AIDevOps
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A man at an office desk reviews code on a terminal screen beside a monitor showing a social media feed.

Continuous Integration. Continuous Delivery. Continuous… Refactoring?

CI/CD has been there for years. AI have made one more thing possible. Continuous Refactoring. And it solves one of the biggest pains of maintaining software - Legacy codebases. Almost no company can sustainably keep the code 'latest + fresh' because new features need to be shipped. Example refactors: → No file longer than 600 lines. → No mystery numbers — every constant gets a name. → No silently swallowed errors. →…

EngineeringAI
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Blue graphic with white text asking: Can you fix my printer?

A few days back, my laptop just froze hard. Had to force power off

I feared it was a hardware issue. Asked Claude Code to walk through the system logs with me. Twenty minutes later, details revealed. It detected that the machine had quietly been running out of memory all afternoon and eventually jammed. And then also made some nice config improvements to prevent the same. We talk about AI for writing code and drafting emails. But this is a nice use case. No need to wait for the…

AI
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Gaurav sits cross-legged on the bonnet of a white car beside a lake, smiling, with dry hills and trees behind.

After working on multiple AI projects, one thing I have realised is…

After working on multiple AI projects, one thing I have realised is that we should be investing a good amount of effort into the transparency of the process, from input to output. They call it Explainable AI, but ultimately, it means you make it feel less magical and smarter. It is easier said than done, but any AI project you are working on, investing efforts in this is going to give you greater rewards down the…

AI
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Gaurav smiles in a selfie beside Harsha Bhogle, who wears glasses, a grey jacket and white t-shirt.

Down to Earth

Cares about co-passengers Teaches people to behave better No celebrity status in his mind That is Harsha Bhogle sir A normal Mumbai to Rajkot flight. But a passenger decided to make it hard for all. She wouldn't cooperate with the staff to put her cabin bag inside, and the flight got one hour late. All passengers were angry. But he calmly explained to her how she could do better. What a soul 🙏

Life & Family
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