Reflections

In our previous post, Mobile On-device AI: Smarter Faster Private Apps, we explored the fundamentals of running AI locally on mobile devices. Now, it’s time to get hands-on and see this technology in action! This practical guide walks you through implementing mobile on-device AI using Google’s powerful Gemma model family, including the cutting-edge Gemma 3n. You’ll learn to deploy these models across iOS, Android, and web platforms using industry-standard frameworks.

While cloud computing drives many AI breakthroughs, a parallel revolution is happening right in our hands: Mobile On-device AI. As mobile devices become ever more powerful, the ability to run AI locally offers a compelling path to faster, more private, and smarter app experiences. As a developer who loves exploring AI and has built mobile apps, I am fascinated by the idea of these two worlds of mobile and AI converging.

Every day we’re seeing fantastic advancements in AI, thanks to more data and powerful computers. This may make it seem like the future of AI is all about getting even more data and bigger computers. But I believe a critical and rapidly evolving piece of the puzzle is about bringing the Intelligence of Artificial Intelligence onto the devices where the data originates (eg: our phones, cameras, and IoT devices) and doing the “smarts” using their own computing capabilities.

We know that RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is a reliable mechanism to augment LLMs with up-to-date data and ground them on facts relevant to the context of the user query, thereby reducing hallucination. When set up properly, it works pretty well. Companies like Perplexity AI and enterprise applications use RAG extensively. However, building a RAG pipeline on your own from scratch can be complex and high maintenance. You need to assemble your data sources, chunk the data, index it, generate embeddings, and store them in a vector database.

I stopped using Chrome a long time ago due to privacy concerns, and I’ve been switching between Firefox, Edge, and occasionally Brave. But I never spent the time to fully compare these browsers and analyze which one best suits my needs. Today, I decided to look deeply into these browsers and ended up going down a rabbit hole of researching their privacy features. Why is this important? Every time we browse a website, we are sharing bits of our digital life with companies we don’t know.

Today I tried something fun - built a Pomodoro timer app mostly by talking to AI instead of typing code myself. And guess what - there is a term for it - vibe coding, coined by Andrej Karpathy 😎. I have done it a few times before, but this is the first time I am using it to build a full app. I wanted to create something that was useful and worked well, so I chose the Pomodoro timer.

A few months ago, if you had told me I’d be deadlifting 155 lbs, I would have laughed and said, “No way!” But here I am, doing it—something I never thought possible. In a previous post in my reimagine journey, I talked about reframing milestones to focus on consistency rather than arbitrary goals. At the time, I was working out on my own, trying to stay active with strength training and Zone 2 walks.

Today I tried Claude Code, the new agentic coding tool announced by Anthropic this morning. Unlike other agentic tools, Claude Code is a CLI tool. Claude has been my favorite AI coding partner so far. I use it via GitHub Copilot and as standalone through its web interface. I was curious to see how it works in CLI and decided to give it a try. In this post, I share my first impressions of using Claude Code - how I set it up, what I loved about it, what I didn’t, and how it compares to other similar tools.

Of late, I have been building and learning about browser extensions for a few projects. It was surprising to learn that there are many ways to build UI for these extensions and the most interesting one was the Side Panel UI available to Chrome extensions. In this post, I will talk about the Chrome side panel, how to build one and the advantages and limitations of using it. The Chrome side panel It is a vertical panel that opens on either side of the browser window, providing quick access to your bookmarks, history, reading list, and Google Lens.

I have been using many Vercel products in my web projects - for example, their Next.js app framework, deployment infrastructure and Vercel AI SDK. I love these tools because are easy to use and onboard, they are reliable and fast - and most of them are open source, which is fantastic ❤️. Their latest innovation is v0.dev, an AI-powered tool that helps you build frontend applications using a conversational chat interface.