Field Notes

Author

B. Talvinder

Field Notes

Observations from the intersection of AI, product, and the India tech ecosystem. Arguments, not summaries.

Device-Level Blocking Won’t Stop Digital Arrest Scams — The UI Is the Real Vulnerability
Product Security
Interface Design
India

India’s directive to block scammer device IDs on WhatsApp misses the real attack surface: the visual trust layer that makes victims bypass every security control.

Mar 22, 2026
Model Routing Is the New Unit Economics
Agentic Systems
Product Economics
AI Infrastructure

AI products that don’t implement model routing will have 30-50% worse margins than competitors by 2027.

Mar 22, 2026
Why Consensus Voting Fails for Agent Truthfulness
Agentic Systems
Production AI
Agentic Architecture

Pass@k works for code generation because test suites provide external verification. For factual accuracy, consensus amplifies correlated errors instead of cancelling them.

Mar 19, 2026
Chain-of-Thought Has an Efficiency Tax
AI Operations
Production AI
Cost Optimization

Reasoning models cost 3-10x more in tokens and latency. Most teams optimize model size but ignore reasoning efficiency — and there’s no dashboard for the waste.

Mar 18, 2026
The GitHub Slopocalypse and the Coming Trust Tax
Agentic Systems
Software Engineering
Open Source

AI-generated code is flooding GitHub, and the cognitive cost of verifying code provenance before you can use it is about to double.

Mar 16, 2026
What Zari-Zardozi Teaches Us About Agent Coordination
Agentic Systems
AI Architecture
India

A 400-year-old Indian embroidery craft solves the coordination problem that most multi-agent AI architectures get wrong.

Mar 16, 2026
Zimbo Meetings and the Ghost Work Tax
Leadership
Operations
Remote Work

A 30-minute meeting costs 2.5 hours of actual work. Most organizations track the 30 minutes. None track the ghost work.

Mar 16, 2026
Stop Funding Federated Learning in Indian Healthcare
Healthcare AI
Infrastructure

Federated learning pilots ignore the actual infrastructure problems in Indian healthcare—most tier-2 hospitals can’t maintain patient records, let alone train models locally.

Mar 5, 2026
Distress Detection Is a Switching Cost, Not a Safety Feature
Agentic Systems
Product Strategy
Consumer AI

Consumer AI platforms accumulate intimate emotional context that creates unprecedented lock-in — and unprecedented risk.

Mar 4, 2026
Why Indian SaaS Companies Will Win the Agent Reliability War
Agentic Systems
Indian SaaS
Production AI

Indian SaaS companies have a structural advantage in agent deployment: twenty years of building reliability layers for unreliable conditions.

Mar 4, 2026
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Side B — Poetry, philosophy, and the thinking that doesn’t fit anywhere else. The record isn’t complete without it.