takes

July 11, 2026 · 2 min read

opinions i’ll defend, bets i’m making, and things i was wrong about. argue with me at suriyaganesh097 at gmail.com.

controversial opinions i have

• pessimism is defaulting to laziness. optimism is the harder, rarer skill.
• you should have enemies.
• say “no” to more obligations and defend your time aggressively.

🔁 things i changed my mind about

• what language you speak is important.
• everyone should be running towards a goal or dream all the time
• college degree actually matters

🤦 stuff i was completely wrong about

• you’ll have to work weekends to win.
• one guy hacking away in the back can build a lasting product.
• building software in untyped languages is fine.

🎲 predictions i’m betting on

• affordances for agents will be inherently different than affordances for humans.
• probabilistic software systems are going to be the most deployed type of software.
• RL is going to be a very important paradigm (if it isn’t already)

🧪 experiments that didn’t work

• building an always on AI agent to teach languages. learnings here
• marketplace for artworks.
• employee analytics for companies to better retain people.

🤫 things nobody told me about software

• it is better to copy paste the relevant code, instead of loading a library / framework for it.
• everything is just a text representation of binary data
• all protocols are synthetic and will have nuances / bugs ¹

🧠 advice i’d give my younger self

• focus on deep work, commit to a single thing for more than a few months — only those matter in the long run

updated on Jul 11, 2026