The second eye is a machine now
The second eye that decides whether to trust you is now often an AI, and it can only repeat what your own words gave it to say.
Engineering · Travel · Photography
I'm Manohar. At an energy-tech startup Racanaa in Bengaluru I look after engineering across the board — the full software lifecycle, data, QA, security, DevOps, product support — and, it being a startup, the IT and infrastructure too: networks, firewalls, keeping the whole thing standing. 'VP, Data & Engineering' is the title on paper; in practice it's all of it. These days I'm playing with AI almost every day to build and test new products. I've been making photographs since 1996 and I'll take any excuse for a road trip. On the side, my wife Roma and I are reviving our ancestral home in the Almora hills as Kunja Village Homestay. My travel and photo journal lives separately at mnegi.com.
The second eye that decides whether to trust you is now often an AI, and it can only repeat what your own words gave it to say.
OTAs make you visible. Your own website makes you profitable. Here's the data — the real costs, the gains, and the honest downsides nobody mentions.
The only region our customers let us run in went dark, and took its backups with it. We were fully compliant — that's exactly why we were stuck.
We worry about whether AI makes things up. We rarely ask whether we do — rewording, regenerating, or filling the gap until it tells us what we wanted.
We've been trying to actually run an AI-driven development lifecycle — a real process the AI follows, not prompt-and-hope. Here's the honest state: what we've learned, what we're really after, the gap we keep hitting, and the options we're weighing.
No schedule, no spam — just new essays when they’re ready. The slow web, delivered slowly.