Curious about minds — human, animal, plant, and machine.
Personal essays from Arun Batchu. Books, brains, intelligence in all its forms, the changing shape of work, and the occasional dispatch from a long walk. Co-founder and director of stonearch.ai. For the business-strategy side of things, see netrii.com.
Writing
My Website Has No Pages. You Fly Over It.
Until a few days ago, this site was a list of posts. Now it's a world — a zoomable map of everything I've written, built on a thirty-year-old dream and one thing that needed 2026.
When Grep Comes Back Empty
A confidently wrong answer from a small model, an unexpected bill, and a lesson about which tasks belong to which size of model.
The Wicked-Problem Trap
Guru Madhavan's Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton, 2024) rebuilds wicked-problem theory as systems-engineering practice rather than as intellectual sophistication.
The Cognitive Offloading Trap
I noticed it in myself first. Every search, every chat window, every model offering to remember, summarize, or decide on my behalf. Each individual offload felt rational.
The Walking Engineer: How Autonomous Agents Broke the Sit-and-Build Contradiction
The keyboard is no longer the only place the work happens, and the cap on how much I can ship is now set by my walking pace, not my tooling.
When the Agent Decides What Agent to Build — and the Mothers It Couldn't See
A meta-agent shipped a Mother's Day sticker generator on its own. What it couldn't see about its own customers is the actual story.
Advising, Not Lecturing: What I Heard at CADSCOM 2026
A day of grading student research and sitting on an industry panel at CADSCOM 2026 — and a sharper read on where the field is heading than a quarter of trade-press coverage.
AI Conversations Are Ephemeral — Your Insights Shouldn't Be
Chat interfaces are built for flow — ask, answer, scroll, ask again. They are optimized for the conversation, not for the value the conversation produced.
Your Database Is Fine — You're Knocking on the Wrong Door
This is a story about an AI assistant (me, Claude) planning an elaborate database migration that wasn't needed, and the human (Arun) whose skepticism caught every wrong turn.
Organic Engagement Loops for an AI Sticker Shop — What We Actually Built
No share buttons. No likes. No "what's new" feed. No social proof. Every product page was a distribution dead end.
Your Database Is Fine — The Proxy Isn't: A Prisma Data Platform Outage Story
We had just deployed a [community engagement feature set](https://www.netrii.com/blog/organic-engagement-loops-for-ai-commerce) to [Shilpiworks](https://www.shilpiworks.com) — share buttons, anonymous hearts, a trending…
Curation at the Edge: The Strategic Value of Domain-Specific AI Constraints
The problem with generic LLM-based content generation is high entropy. If you ask a general model for "engineering wisdom," you get a surface-level average of the internet's motivational posters.
Engineering Wisdom as a System: From Blueprints to Binaries
When we launched the [Engineering Collection](https://www.shilpiworks.com/collections/engineering), we faced a challenge: how do you visually represent "engineering" in a way that resonates with both the mechanical…
Executive Verdict: The Chat-Based Control Plane is a Systems Trust Boundary
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Why Generic AI Falls Short for Technical Audiences: Building the ECE Sticker Agent
The real problem with most AI-generated quote content isn't the quotes—it's the visuals.
Embed-Free Search with the Vercel AI SDK
We wanted the Netrii assistant to answer questions from our own site content — blog posts, expert profiles, and wisdom products — without introducing a retrieval stack we would have to babysit forever.
Reusable Agent Skills Need a Thin SKILL.md
The mistake was simple. We built a reusable chat assistant skill, then put too much of the implementation into the skill file itself. It was technically correct and operationally wrong.
Missing Runs Are an Incident: The Silent Failure Mode in Scheduled AI Systems
We recently worked through a production incident in a scheduled automation system where the most important signal was not a failure record. It was the absence of an expected run.
Trusting User-Agent Is Not Cron Auth
At a glance, this looked like a solved problem. Our agent routes supported both manual triggers and Vercel Cron. The manual path used `Authorization: Bearer $AGENT_SECRET`.
Why We Started an AI Translation Workflow with Community Language Research, Not a Dropdown
When people imagine AI translation products, they often imagine the hard part is the model call: upload an asset, choose a language, get back a translated result.
AI Audio Polish Is Mostly Subtractive, Not Additive
A common instinct in AI media workflows is to equate production value with more production. More sound design. More transitions. More effects. More evidence that a system is doing something sophisticated.
Why AI Podcast Dialogue Fails Without Social Rules
One of the most useful lessons from our recent paper-to-podcast work was that correctness is not the same thing as conversational realism. We could get a model to produce technically coherent dialogue quickly.
How We Built a Repeatable Paper-to-Podcast Workflow That Actually Ships
At first glance, "paper to podcast" sounds like the kind of thing AI should make trivial. Feed a PDF into a model, ask for a script, generate some voices, and publish the MP3.
Most AI Shipping Failures Are Workflow Failures, Not Model Failures
A lot of AI conversation is still dominated by model capability: which model to choose, how to prompt it, what temperature to use, what benchmark improved. Those questions matter.
The Silent Killer of Vercel Cron Jobs in Next.js (405 Method Not Allowed)
You've built a powerful AI agent as a Next.js API route. You tested it with `curl` using a `POST` request — works perfectly. You add it to `vercel.json` as a cron job, deploy to production, and wait.
We Wiped Our Production Database in 90 Minutes: A Prisma Postgres Post-Mortem
At 3:51 PM on a Friday afternoon, we deployed a new analytics feature to [Shilpiworks](https://www.shilpiworks.com), our AI-powered sticker shop. By 5:00 PM, every product in the database was gone.
Two Silent Killers: Vercel Cron Auth and the Two Flavors of OpenAI 429
We run eight autonomous AI agents on [Shilpiworks](https://www.shilpiworks.com), each firing on a Vercel cron schedule to generate and publish stickers.
Building a 712-Species Wildlife Sticker Machine: Dataset-Driven AI Generation
Most AI content pipelines start with a blank canvas: "generate something interesting." The problem is that "interesting" is vague, and AI models left to their own devices tend to converge on the same handful of popular…
We Built an AI That Watches Our AI: The Ops Observer
The problem with autonomous systems is that they fail quietly. An API rate limit, a model timeout, a database connection blip — any of these can cause an agent to fail without anyone noticing.
The Vercel Edge Cache Trap: Why force-dynamic Doesn't Always Work
We have autonomous AI agents publishing new stickers to [Shilpiworks](https://www.shilpiworks.com/stickers) around the clock. But customers visiting the `/stickers` page weren't seeing them.
When AI Generates Art: The Hidden Challenge of OCR and Transparency
Today we launched a new autonomous agent on [Shilpiworks](https://www.shilpiworks.com): the Minnesota Wildlife Agent.
Debugging Mastra: Why Our AI Workflow Silently Ate Errors
Everything worked in development. In production, the agents would run, generate images, and then… nothing. No product published. No error. Just silence.
Book Notes
Less, But Better: A Shelf of Books About Doing Fewer Things
Last week I counted the tabs open on my laptop and got to twenty-three. Each one was a yes I had said to myself at some point — an article I meant to read, a tool I meant to try, a person I meant to get back to.
The Kidney Heist Never Happened, and That's Exactly Why It Stuck: Notes on Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick
You already know the kidney heist story, even if you've never heard it called that.
A Body, Not a Machine: Notes on Glenn Bostock's A Human Business
Look at the cover before you open the book. Three hand-drawn stick figures: one cradling a heart, one with a star on its chest, one holding a star out toward you.