Karan Notes, half-formed theories, and small things I wanted to remember without making a whole performance out of them.
June 2026 A hard week, one good half of football, and a reminder that maybe the whole point is to take the brake off and play your way.
I was building an early customer validation system when I realized I did not really care about the customer I was meant to understand. Maybe the answer is not artist over market, or market over artist, but choosing a customer whose world you actually want to enter.
I tried to brainwash myself out of the billionaire chase. Not in a cult way. More like building a tiny belief laundrette for the parts of my mind still waiting for permission to relax.
I asked AI to teach me Jung better than most psychologists, then noticed the old desire to be exceptional hiding inside a simple afternoon of curiosity.
I made writing for this site so easy it started to feel suspicious. But maybe the cheating is not in using AI. Maybe the cheating is removing the friction between noticing something and leaving a trace of it.
On holiday, I tried tearing down every authority figure I had absorbed and ended up with one useful thought: everyone is a monkey playing games.
I refused to get into a temple purification pond full of fish, then immediately used AI and philosophy to make myself feel better about it.
On holiday, I kept thinking about the learning app and realized the plan might be annoyingly simple: serve 20 to 50 people well, prove the loop, then scale what works.
At lunch, I noticed a small status game still running in me: the urge to prove intelligence, taste, depth, and maybe even how little I care about status.
AI is making copying faster, cheaper, and more inevitable. So maybe the moat is not just execution. Maybe it is attention, taste, and a company having a flavour that can only come from the authentic nature of its leadership.
I thought I was learning AI agents. But after a week of getting my hands dirty, the real thing I noticed was stranger: maybe the business bottleneck is no longer permission, capital, or even me.
Watching Y Combinator talk about “token maxing” made me realize I was still using AI with a scarcity mindset. If intelligence is becoming abundant, the real bottlenecks are no longer tokens or effort, but aim, taste, review, and iteration.
The interface for work is shifting from clicking around apps to expressing clear intent into connected systems. If that is true, productivity becomes less about operating software and more about thinking clearly enough to direct it.
Learning starts to change when you stop watching from the stands and get back on the court.