About this publication

Building with AI, studying how people learn to work with it

I’m Bharat. I recently finished a PhD at Berkeley studying how people learn to orient toward algorithmic systems — how platforms teach participation without formal instruction.

Now I’m building. Full-stack tools, AI-assisted, shipped and used. A personal finance tracker. An ERP system for my wife’s health supplements company. A research knowledge platform. All built with AI coding agents, in a language I don’t formally “know.”

The building became its own research. How do you develop a mental model of an AI system’s capabilities? How do you systematize what you learn across projects? What compounds and what doesn’t?

This Substack is where I work through that — the tools, the process, the practice of getting better at building with AI. Not tips. Not tutorials. The actual trajectory, documented as it happens.

First series: how I went from re-explaining everything every session to a system that learns from my own work.