Anthropic just watermarked every word Claude writes. Copywriters are celebrating. I argue that's premature. The real story isn't detection. It's that we've built a culture where writing takes minutes and reading still takes hours.
Shad Linga: How to grasp a text’s intent without asking its author
A scholar at Ramakrishna Math told me about a method used to interpret the Vedas. And it turned out to be the sharpest tool I've found for a much older question: what a text says vs. what its author claims it says.
The AI Tells You Can’t Edit Out
I recently submitted an essay as part of my AI policy course. The assessors noted that AI use wasn't prohibited, but had to be documented. It got me thinking: what exactly would they look for?
Wrote Too Well. AI Suspected.
Jamir Nazir won a Caribbean regional prize at the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. 7,806 entries. One winner from his region. Days later, online commentators ran his story through AI detection tools and declared it machine-written. Granta's own publisher said the judges may have "awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism." Three detection tools were used. Three different verdicts. This is the new plagiarism charge. Easy to throw. Hard to disprove. Burden of proof falls on the writer. I've been working on this problem: collecting AI tells, reverse-engineering prompts, ghostwriting for people who need to prove their own voice on the page. Here's what I've learned about what actually separates human writing from machine writing. Hint: it's not the em dashes.
The Self That Survives the Layoff
A year ago I wrote about an engineer who lost a $150k job and was driving for DoorDash, living in an RV. Last week, out of nowhere, I looked him up. He's now Head of Engineering at a startup. I felt relieved. Not just for him, but for everyone wondering when their number comes up. Wrote about what his story made me think about: identity, layoffs, and the version of yourself that exists outside the job.
How AI Is Flattening Indian English Into American English
"No way he has written this!" Felt this way reading a LinkedIn post from a long-lost friend? He cannot write that well, you think. But that's below the belt. Maybe he improved. A steep learning curve, but not impossible. Yet something's amiss. Then it dawns. The language, the idioms, the metaphors. All highly polished. All... Continue Reading →
AI Made Us 3x Faster. Our Output Didn’t Change.
Robert Solow said something in 1987 that feels written for 2026: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." We are living the AI version of it right now.
The Great Inversion: When Articulation Becomes the Bottleneck
25 years ago, Linus Torvalds said: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." In 2026, Zerodha's CTO flipped it: "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." The great flip happened in just 25 years.
What I Learned from Scott Adams: Systems, Stacks, and Selfishness
I started my very first newsletter quoting Scott Adam’s, Systems > Goals That’s how deeply I internalized this particular insight. With the news of his passing yesterday, I pondered over his final message: "I had an amazing life... If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking that you pay it forward... Be useful." That’s one beautiful parting message. And one of the 3 top lessons that most resonated with me.
2025, or What Happened When the Reservoir Ran Dry
When I started this newsletter (back in 2024), I had the confidence of someone who'd never run out of ideas. By this year, the reservoir had run dry. But I kept writing anyway. Here's what I learned from writing 51 newsletters in 2025: → AI dominated my output (31%) when I planned to write about policy → Being right about content marketing's comeback didn't prevent months of struggle → The newsletter became less about expertise, more about documenting uncertainty → Writing became thinking in public The biggest lesson? Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. And that applies to career too.
Musings by Madhav 