Lakshmi Narasimhan
essays 75 posts

Essays

When Claude Code Goes Down: A Meditation on Modern Dependency

Let me paint you a picture. It’s this evening. I’m in the zone. Fingers flying across the keyboard, that beautiful flow state where you and your AI coding assistant are one harmonious bug-squashing machine. And then, without warning, without so much as a courtesy error message, Claude Code just… dies. Not the graceful kind of death where systems send you helpful notifications. Well, okay, they had a status page. There was technically a “we’re experiencing technical difficulties” message somewhere on the internet if you went looking for it. But in the moment? When you’re mid-keystroke and suddenly your AI copilot just stops responding? It just felt gone. Vanished. Disappeared like my motivation to manually write boilerplate code.

10 Ways to Waste Time and Money with AI Agents: A Field Guide to Self-Sabotage

Money spent is obvious—we burn through tokens like a hedge fund manager through investor capital, exhausting our weekly quotas by Tuesday. Time, however, is subtle and invisible. Something I call the Anti-AI Paradox: that creeping realization that you could have hand-coded the entire feature in half the time it took to “collaborate” with your AI assistant. Let me save you some grief. 1. Being Super Vague AI models are getting smarter by the day. But they can’t read tea leaves like some digital oracle you summoned from Silicon Valley. “My ‘Schedule’ button isn’t scheduling the post.” Sure, Einstein. I can see that. Revolutionary observation.

You’re Making Your SaaS Harder Than It Needs to Be

A few weeks ago, I spent an entire evening chasing a bug in a React component that refused to re-render. I tried useEffect. Then useMemo. Then stared at the dependency array like it had personally wronged me. Eventually, I fixed it — by restarting the dev server. That’s when it hit me: React wasn’t made for people like me. React was built for teams — with dedicated frontend engineers, design systems, review processes, and time to care about component hierarchies. I’m just trying to build a SaaS. Alone.