Dhanush Ram (DR)

This engineering > most payroll software slop

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When the Hon’ble Prime Minister speaks to you for 20 minutes during Mann Ki Baat, you feel supported and encouraged. But when he meets you in person and speaks with you, the experience is far more inspiring. Proud to be building @GalaxEye at a time when the Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi is leading the nation with a clear vision, where space technology is not just an idea but a real force helping India rise in the global order. Deeply motivated to build in India, for the world.

World's First #OptoSAR Satellite & India's largest Privately Built Satellite is on its way to the launchpad 🚀 For 4.5 years, we lived in the gap between a "world’s first" vision and a thousand "it’s not possible" warnings. Building deep-tech IP led startup with limited funds isn't just a challenge; it’s a daily war against gravity and doubt. We were questioned at every turn. Every milestone was met with a "why?" or a "how?" or a or a "someone would have done it already if it were possible." There were days when the weight of being first felt like it might break us. But we stayed. We fought. And we built it. Today, as I look at our satellite—tested, finished, and ready to ship—the emotion is hard to put into words. It’s more than hardware; it’s 1,642 days of pure grit and unshakable belief. To the team @GalaxEye that bled for this: we did the impossible. To the skeptics: thank you for the fuel. To the investors, users and our supporters: cant be more thankful The satellite is ready. And we are just getting started. 🚀

@SpecialeInvest wins APEX26 #VentureCapital #Award on back of 7 Exits including @AgnikulCosmos with 60.4x return; @rocketlane_ w 11.9x; Truelark w 18x. The firm also raised its Rs.600-Cr Fund III. More at tinyurl.com/3hpauudj #StartupIndia @gansub @cavalecan @visheshrajaram

Humbled to share that we successfully test fired 3 semi-cryogenic rocket engines simultaneously, as a cluster. All the 3 engines are 3d printed as single pieces of hardware - designed and manufactured in-house at AgniKul Cosmos Rocket Factory - 1. As with all our propulsion systems, these 3 engines are also powered by electric motor driven pumps. This test involved calibrating 6 pumps, 6 motors and tuning 6 speed control algorithms to work together in perfect sync to achieve uniform startup, steady state and shutdown performance across the entire system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a test has been performed in India with semi cryogenic engines. We are extremely grateful to have the opportunity to be building world class, original space technology from India, for the world with the support of @isro and @INSPACeIND #Agnibaan #RocketEngineCluster #ElectricPumpFedEngines #Agnilet #SinglePieceEngine #3dprinting #RocketEngineTest #AdditiveManufacturing #Agnikul #AgnikulCosmos #StartupIndia #MakeinIndia #madeinIndiaForTheWorld @srinathr155 @moin_spm @satchakra_iitm @iitmadras @iitmrp @IITMIC @tdbgoi @IndiaDST @ANRFIndia @TIDCO_1965 @startupindia @TheStartupTN @Guidance_TN @startup_mission

I am a proud investor in this ambitious startup. The returns from this investment go far beyond financial rewards. It’s about getting a ringside seat to watch the literal ‘take-off’ of Indian talent…

100% @ShabbosK brilliant as always Be proud AMERICANS. Do not be an easily bought agent of foreign influence.

Next target: 2 nm fab in Bharat.🇮🇳

A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks. Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly telling the LLM what code to write... in words. It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful, especially once you adapt to it, configure it, learn to use it, and wrap your head around what it can and cannot do. This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks. I'd expect something similar to be happening to well into double digit percent of engineers out there, while the awareness of it in the general population feels well into low single digit percent. IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits. Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased. Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance. Certainly I feel net way faster at what I was going to do, but the main effect is that I do a lot more than I was going to do because 1) I can code up all kinds of things that just wouldn't have been worth coding before and 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion. Leverage. LLMs are exceptionally good at looping until they meet specific goals and this is where most of the "feel the AGI" magic is to be found. Don't tell it what to do, give it success criteria and watch it go. Get it to write tests first and then pass them. Put it in the loop with a browser MCP. Write the naive algorithm that is very likely correct first, then ask it to optimize it while preserving correctness. Change your approach from imperative to declarative to get the agents looping longer and gain leverage. Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it. Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We're also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements. Questions. A few of the questions on my mind: - What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows *a lot*. - Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro). - What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music? - How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work? TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.

Introducing Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work. Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code.

Day 1 of decoding how to start a D2C beverage brand 1/ Research: When I started, I was just as clueless as you might be right now. My first instinct was simple. Go online, find vendors and manufacturers, DM them, talk to freelancers, and somehow piece the whole thing together. So I hired a freelancer to help with formulations. And within a few months, I realised this wasn’t it. We lost 2-3 months trying to figure things out remotely. Because the beverage world doesn’t live on Google. It lives on the ground. The real turning point was when I started attending food expos. >If you're building in beverages, this is your battlefield. This is where you meet actual vendors, manufacturers, founders, packaging suppliers, flavour houses, machinery guys, literally everyone who makes this industry move. And this is where you can understand ingredients and formulations, which vendors can teach you a great deal about. Few expos I attended: >FI India >CMPL India >Drinktec india >SIAL India And honestly, the only skill you need in those halls is courage. Some people will ignore you. Some will dismiss you. But a few will genuinely vibe with your idea and open doors you never knew existed. That’s when real R&D finally begins. So if you're starting, your first step is not finding a freelancer. It’s showing up in the right rooms and talking to the right people. Everything changes from there.

Humbled to share the simultaneous firing of two of our electric pump-fed semi cryo engines, controlled by our in-house engine computer software. Since these pumps are driven by electric motors there is increased level of control available to balance the thrusts across the engines compared to conventional thrust balancing techniques @isro @INSPACeIND @IndiaDST @tdbgoi @IITMIC @iitmadras @iitm_respark @TIDCO_1965 @startup_mission @Guidance_TN @ANRFIndia @srinathr155 @moin_spm @satchakra_iitm #Agnibaan #RocketEngine #ElectricPumpFedEngines #Agnilet #SinglePieceEngine #3dprinting #RocketEngineTest #AdditiveManufacturing #Agnikul #AgnikulCosmos #StartupIndia #MakeinIndia #madeinIndiaForTheWorld

Humbled to have had the opportunity at @IAC2025sydney to unveil reuse of our launch vehicles as a strategy going forward for our missions. This is backed by patents we have recently received in the US, Europe and India and further strengthens our commitment to building original space tech solutions in India for the world. This is also our commitment to "Sustainable Space: Resilient Earth" which is #IAC2025's theme, where we aim to ensure that no part of our rockets are fully expended or left behind. Thanks to @isro , Department of Space (DoS), @INSPACeIND for showing willingness to allow us to attempt this both from a technology and a policy standpoint. Thanks to the relentless support from @IndiaDST @tdbgoi @iitmadras @iitm_respark @IITMIC @TIDCO_1965 @startup_mission @Guidance_TN as always. @srinathr155 @moin_spm @satchakra_iitm @AgnikulCosmos #Agnikul #AgnikulCosmos #Agnibaan #3Dprinting #AdditiveManufacturing #Rocket #RocketEngine #MakeinIndia #madeinIndiaForTheWorld #IAC2025

Announcing the formation of the DeepTech Advisory Board under the Startup Policy Forum — uniting investors, founders, policymakers, academicians and deeptech experts. Anchoring #100DesiDeepTechs, the Board will support India’s top 100 deeptech startups across domains like semiconductors, defence, green hydrogen, space, drones, EVs and more. @prashanthp @sateesh_andra @Pai_dPiper @visheshrajaram @tarunsmehta @anirudhnsharma @ChagunBasha @DrManishDiwan @profthillai @SharmaShradha @vibhores @smdcmc @SPF_India @startupindia Applications close today. 👉 lnkd.in/gRkvXJvg

Startup Central | "It is a very gratifying moment to have Fund-3," says Vishesh Rajaram of Speciale Invest He reveals the numbers behind the fund - average cheque size, no of investments - key sectors they are bullish on, deep tech, Gen AI and more👇 @JudeSannith24 @visheshrajaram @SpecialeInvest

Speciale Invest closes Rs 600 Cr fund III to back early-stage deeptech startups entrackr.com/snippets/speci…

In a boost for deep tech, especially those looking to help India be sovereign in its technology, VC firm @SpecialeInvest has raised a new fund of Rs Rs 600 crore At Rs 600 cr, this is likely one of India’s largest pre-seed stage, deep tech-focused fund thehindubusinessline.com/companies/deep…

India’s space ambition is no longer just about launching rockets, but about building a full-fledged space economy. At the Accel Advanced Manufacturing Summit, Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at @SpecialeInvest, @srinathr155, Co-founder & CEO at @AgnikulCosmos, @kshitijgokul, Founder & CTO at @PixxelSpace, and @prayanks, Partner at @Accel, unpacked what it will take to scale India’s presence in space, and why the real opportunity now lies beyond just building hardware. Key takeaways: • The space economy is shifting downstream: The real value lies beyond rockets, in Earth observation analytics, and commercial applications. • Innovation must go beyond cost: Startups such as AgniKul and Pixxel are leading innovation through proprietary IP, showing that value creation, not just affordability, is the new edge in space. • Operational excellence drives scale: R&D is just the start; certifications, compliance, and quality are essential to win global trust. • Global thinking is a must: Success depends on obsessing over real-world use cases and solving customer problems with a global-first mindset. @prashanthp

India’s Speciale Invest, a deep-science and technology-focused venture capital firm, has closed its third fund at Rs 600 crore ($68.4m), at a time when deep tech is emerging as a bright spot in India’s otherwise cautious early-stage funding environment. buff.ly/iGokYLd