Khair Alanam (Hegemonic Dev)

I'm learning to build tools, connect with solopreneurs and founders, and make my first dollar online. My goals for 2026: - Ship 1 AI tool - Get my first paying user - Make my first $1 For now, I want to build a community and follow builders, share my learnings and opinions.

@Tim_Denning In all honesty, considering whatever is happening around us, it's the best thing you can do. It's much more dangerous to work your ass off and become unemployed than experience a bit of freedom. There's solace in it.

The most dangerous thing you can ever do is experience a tiny bit of freedom. Once you do you’ll be unemployable for the rest of your life.

It's infuriating that the entire world around us, in the form of job applications, housing, food expenses, trying to build a family, AI, etc., are making our lives unlivable, almost as we are being told it's all our fault for all this. The people playing this game want to shake your hands and say how sorry they were that this is how we are suffering. After all, blame the game, not the player. But they don't realise that all of us have the energy to do both.

If there's anything that I have learnt from experiences of freelancers, it's to ALWAYS have a contract before laying down the first line of code. That contract is your weapon if you stand by it. If you don't, then the client will use it. So make sure the contract is firmly in your grasp before the client exploits it.

A client of mine runs a 40-person IT services company in Pune. They landed a contract with a European bank last year. Dream deal. 18-month engagement. Everyone celebrated. 3 months in, the bank's project manager asked for "a small addition." Then another. Then a full module that was never in the original scope. My client said yes to everything. No pushback. No documentation. Just delivered. Worked weekends. Put his best people on it. He thought if we go above and beyond, they will renew. They will refer us to other departments. This is how you build trust with large corporates. Invoice time came. The bank's procurement team pulled out the MSA. "We only owe you what is in the signed scope." 40% of the invoice. Rejected. Rs 1.2 crore in delivered work. Zero recovery. The project manager who asked for all those extras? He shrugged. "That was informal. You should have raised a change request." This is not a one-off. I see this pattern with Indian service providers exporting to large corporates every single month. They come from a culture where over-delivery builds relationships. Where the client remembers your extra effort. Where trust is earned by going beyond. That works with Indian SMEs. It is disastrous with multinational corporates. Here is what Indian service exporters do not understand about how large corporates work. The person pressuring you to deliver fast is measured on project delivery. Not your invoice. The person who pays you has never heard your name. They only read the MSA. The legal counsel reviews every line item against the signed scope. Your hustle is invisible to them. The procurement team pays against signed documents. Not verbal promises. Not emails. Not WhatsApp messages from the project manager saying "please add this urgently." These are three different people in three different departments with three different incentives. The person who asks for the work has no power over the person who pays for it. Every single change in scope needs a written request, a documented approval, and a signed amendment. Before you write a single line of code. Before you assign a single developer. No paper trail means no payment. No exceptions. Not even if the client's own team asked for the change. India has over 50,000 IT services companies exporting to global corporates. Most of them are run by brilliant technologists who have never read their own MSA. Who treat the change request procedure as bureaucracy. Something that slows things down. Something to skip when the client is in a hurry. It is not bureaucracy. It is your invoice protection system. The MSA protects them. The change request procedure protects you. The vendor who over-delivers without documentation is not being generous. They are doing free work and calling it strategy.

Guys, I am scared and cooked. I shared an IG reel with my family. The reel showed two cats fighting inside a transparent bag (the kind of bag you keep pets inside) carried by some biker in the middle of a traffic. It was funny and cute. Minutes later, my mom saw this and told me, "This is actually AI." So 3 things: - I got tricked by AI for the first time ever. - My mom who has no exposure to AI was able to pinpoint that it's AI, while I, who is experienced in it, wasn't. (Absolutely humiliated) - AI video generation is getting too real, too scary. If there's anything that I have genuine concern for, even when ChatGPT got first released, was the use of realistic videos generated by AI and deepfakes. The ramifications can be fatal if such a Pandora's box is given to the wrong hands. GenAI is very scary. It's essentially a tool that can be used as a weapon.

@SimonHoiberg True that. It takes time and effort.

@hegemonic_dev Many founders don't even have that

"Just use Vercel." "Just use Supabase." "Just use Clerk." Cool. Now your auth, database, and deployment are owned by 3 different companies who can change pricing whenever they want. And the rest of your product is wrapping OpenAI. At some point you have to ask yourself: what do I actually own here?

@Timeswitch @vxunderground Lol that is true.

@hegemonic_dev @vxunderground They are trained on whatever they can scrap from GitHub, prob including my 1 semester homework assignments

AI is amazing. I am extremely pro-AI 1. It has lowered the barrier of entry for programmers, resulting in hundreds upon hundreds of slop applications vulnerable to everything. This is job security. 2. AI influencers keep saying AI is going to destroy cybersecurity. This is good. AI influencers don't understand the size and scope of cybersecurity, they think it's just smashing a keyboard and making cat noises. This makes people less likely to enter our field, making us more valuable, making us more money. It's job security. Keep telling people cybersecurity is dead. 3. It's given us a new area of research: AI security 4. It's made task automation easier with slop Python scripts. In summary, cybersecurity is dead. DO NOT try to work in this field. It's all over. Cybersecurity has been solved!

This is so true. This reminds me on a personal level of my parents who would always tell me things that don't even seem urgent or important, like making my bed, bathing every single day even weekends, waking up super early like 5 am, etc. But later on as I entered my job, those same things made me feel good about myself and my life. So many of my peers tend to respect my actions and I would never give value to that because I thought everyone did that. Turns out it isn't.

very early in your career it's very important that you work for a manager who holds you to very high standards no matter how you hate it. 2 years down the line you will be doing some work,good work and realise it's not you, its the standards you were once held to. we are the sum total of the standards we are held to.

@PratikSinhatwt @YashHustle_22 I used to dual boot some linux distros back in school days. I dual booted Kali because it looked cool but was confused as to how to use that considering it's mainly used in cybersecurity.

@YashHustle_22 yes, but back then I wasn't knowing a single command, so I deleted it

Developers be honest. Have you ever used Kali Linux?

@THESTREETVOICE3 Well that requires real experience. As brimstone says, some things you just can't teach.

Certifications prove you can study. Labs prove you can think. But, which one actually matters when the breach happens?

@_Creation22 That's really great. How did you get to talk to real users? Did you cold DM so many people or something? Can you tell how you experimented with marketing?

Guys, my last month was crazy I tried building a product for the first time, talked to a lot of real users, and experimented with marketing Ended up getting: - 20+ paid users - 120+ signups - 4k+ visitors Eventually got a decent offer to sell the SaaS, so I sold it for better distribution Thank you to everyone who supported me♥️ On to the next thing !!

@MMatt14 This is just too sad. You can somewhat feel the pain in this reddit post. Idk man, but this is certainly not right.

some Filipino guy got laid off by Claude Code they'll regret that eventually

@NehraWorkss Isn't that just GitHub?

A student at IIT Delhi was tired of group projects. Same story every time. One person does everything. Three people watch. Nobody knows who did what. He built a simple tool to track contributions in real time. Every commit. Every document. Every task. Posted it in his department group. Professor saw it. Asked him to present it to the faculty. Faculty asked him to deploy it for all departments. Within one semester 12 departments were using it. The guy who always ended up doing all the work in group projects. Built the system that made sure it could never happen again.

@prateekhh @yezhang1998 Yea that's true. It's bizarre that such big decisions to incorporate AI, lay off a city or two, and make big profits, are made without even being diligent of all these AI and it's need for data.

@hegemonic_dev @yezhang1998 claude already saw your code when it was training on gitHub anyway

Genuine question: if every major company starts scanning their entire codebase with Claude Code (auth flows, security logic, vuln patches, all of it) isn’t that a massive privacy concern? Anthropic would theoretically get visibility into the core product logic and security infrastructure for huge chunks of the world. Even with enterprise “no training” promises and zero-retention policies, that’s a lot of trust to place in a single vendor. Am I overthinking this, or is it actually problematic?

@khushiirl Or u can build games. Another interesting thing to do :D

web dev is too saturated build desktop apps or build mobile apps trust me

While I agree with ur opinion, it's still true that AI is killing tech jobs, just in different ways. Oracle layoffs is one example. Cheating with AI does kill fair hiring but it just so happens when there's just no hope in getting a job in this era, and so people resort to these methods. I don't condone cheating but you gotta understand how job seekers had no options after applying like a million times and failing thousands of interviews. They just need a job.

Hot take: AI isn’t killing tech jobs. Cheating with AI is killing fair hiring. If we ignore this now, we’re building a broken system for the future.

Sometimes, I just wish I could back to 2010s and just experience life once again. No chatgpt, no ai, no claude, no JavaScript frameworks, no react, back when jQuery, php and wordpress were kings, back when one direction was around, back when I could get a shawarma for half the current price, back when life truly felt like life.

It's impressive that the model found a 27 yr old bug in openbsd. But you also need to understand that they could miss even the most basic of vulnerabilities and security issues. It's like they go to the utmost extreme to find that vulnerability but if, say they accidentally pushed some envt variables, they can't even think back and say they goofed up.

So Anthropic built a model that found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Twenty. Seven. Years. Millions of developers looked at that code. Millions of test runs. Thousands of security audits. Claude found it overnight. For $50. And Anthropic said "this is too dangerous to release."