Gautam Arora

Starting 2026 by writing more in public; mostly to think clearly. I work on serious AI & VR systems, but the ideas that stick with me usually come from smaller places: learning, teaching, and building little tools at home. This account will be personal, imperfect, and exploratory.

Day 2 wrapped - and marking off this very special disneyland trip as truly “magical”

Planned our family Disneyland trip with AI. • Claude Code as the agent • Claude Skills for research, planning, tracking, and journaling • A simple companion web app for itineraries, maps, and on-the-go help Planning is usually a chore. This turned it into play.

Disneyland claude skills for trip research built using 1/ disney tips database from @amadad 2/ disney youtube videos parsed with summarize from @steipete

Day 1 at Disneyland - 13 rides, tracked & visualized! 🪄

Inspired by fellow dads exploring AI for personal software: @petergyang, @HamelHusain, @lennysan, @steveruizok

@HamelHusain A beautiful website and a wonderful edu podcast. Subscribed - kids are going to love it!

Wife (who doesn't code) created this website for her educational podcast with Claude Code in 30 min wonderwise.science CC guided her by: - Deploying on vercel and getting a domain - downloaded and analyzed all her content for website copy - made a responsive version - resolved all links to each episode + RSS feed

@addyosmani Something a mentor told me always stuck with me: the best engineers can build “something out of nothing”. The “nothing” was not a vacuum of ideas but the lack of specificity. That engineering skill was to drive clarity into the ambiguity to deliver “something” truly special.

The best engineers never just wrote code. They were clarity merchants. The collapse of the implementation middle isn't making engineering less important but it's revealing what was always important: understanding problems so clearly that the code (now, the spec for our agents) becomes more obvious. The engineers who will thrive aren't those who can translate specs to code fastest. They're the ones who can: 1. Shape ambiguous problems into actionable intent 2. Design the context architecture that makes good outcomes inevitable 3. Judge what matters from what merely works This mirrors what others have observed about business model shifts: when distribution costs drop to zero, value accrues to curation and taste. When implementation costs approach zero, value accrues to problem formulation and judgment. The tools that win won't just accelerate the middle but I think they'll eliminate the need for it to exist separately at all. The craft evolves. It always has. But it remains craft.

@rspitzer Hey Rebecca - so good to reconnect! Doing some fun projects for home & kids is the plan - just bringing back the magic! 🪄

@gautam Working on doing the same thing. It’s been a long time, but looking forward to following along w your thinking! Hope you’re doing well

Starting 2026 by writing more in public; mostly to think clearly. I work on serious AI & VR systems, but the ideas that stick with me usually come from smaller places: learning, teaching, and building little tools at home. This account will be personal, imperfect, and exploratory.

@ShawkyMesbah built a few mini apps for math and reading. planning a slightly larger one now that I have claude code by my side. something that has stuck is that I need to push on the “fun” factor :)

@gautam love this approach whats one of those little tools you built for your kids that actually stuck? curious what kinds of things they find useful vs what you thought they would also writing to think clearly is underrated. most people skip that part

@ajaydsouza Thanks Ajay. Happy New Year to you & family!

@gautam Welcome back my friend. It’s been a while.

@smerchek @steipete would love to try this out if you’re planning to ship this 💛

I'm using a combo of @steipete's summarize.sh, yt-dlp, and my own cli orchestrator to find and summarize a bunch of relevant podcasts to find anything that might help me plan might trip or parse out recommendations. Now, I don't have to select and listen to hours upon hours of podcasts just to get a few recommendations for each city/country.

@amadad @smerchek @steipete heading to Disneyland in 2 wks for my kids birthday. This will come very handy!

@smerchek @steipete I might have to look into that...this was an early version of a similar concept (travel tips): amadad.github.io/disney-tips/

@petergyang @NanoBanana @cursor_ai Love this! The animal hospital theme is adorable. 💛

My 7 year old and I built an animal hospital game tonight where she treats patients using @NanoBanana and @cursor_ai True love is spending a few cents on Nano Banana API to generate animals for an education opportunity. 😅

@ctmorley So Cool! Have to try this with my kids! 💛

Hundreds of questions were asked by my 4-year-old son as we assembled the Reachy Mini robot (2 hours), connected it with Claude Code (5 minutes), integrated real-time VLMs/web search APIs (10 minutes) and brought embodied Al to life at our kitchen table. May the curiosity and creativity of this Generation Alpha, the first Al-native generation, be a wellspring of daily inspiration to us all. Epic foundational work by @huggingface @pollenrobotics @claudeai

Super excited for AI Agents in 2026: @AIatMeta 🤝 @ManusAI

Introducing Meta AI on Meta Quest—Your Smart MR Assistant, Coming Soon meta.com/blog/quest/met…

Over $2b spent in the @MetaQuestVR #VR App Store! Congrats to all the devs!

It's here: #MetaQuest3, the first mainstream mixed reality headset built for immersive experiences. 🌍 Blend physical and digital worlds 🤏 Navigate with hands or controllers 🚫 No wires or battery packs #MetaConnect2023