Category: Musings
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Two Hours on a Monday Morning
Two days before, my morning briefing arrived in the format it had been taking all week. A plain text summary in my inbox at seven in the morning, generated by an automation I built in Claude Code earlier this month. The part I want you to see, verbatim, looked like this: 📤 PUBLISHING TODAY No…
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Nine Point Six Percent
I was browsing the settings menu in Claude Desktop. Not hunting. Just opening drawers, like you would in a kitchen looking for scissors. Under a customize option, tucked into a plugin panel, there was a Marketing section. The other plugins I had already set up sat out in the open. This one was behind a…
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The Librarian and the Historian
I had twenty-six thousand emails in my inbox. I was an early adopter of gmail. With it came decades of accumulated digital debris. The number came up the first time I connected my inbox to Claude. The connection was the smallest move I had made yet in this whole experiment. A few clicks. A consent…
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What the Dashboard Doesn’t Count
Two weeks ago, I published an essay on this site called My First AI Boo Boo. It was about a website migration that had gone wrong. A consolidation of my Substack archive onto WordPress, run by an AI assistant, that had produced thirty-seven fabricated essays under my name and published them live to my site…
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Saturday Morning
I have been writing this series in my head for six weeks. In the time it has taken to draft, the conversation about writers and AI has broken open in public. I do not know how the conversation will sound by the time these posts have all been published. It is Saturday morning. I carry…
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Nobody Asked Us
I wrote Hindsight because I needed to understand something. Not to resolve it. Not to arrive at an answer I could hand to a reader neatly wrapped. I needed to understand what it costs a woman to build a life on a story she was never given in full.
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Half of Us
The survey landed in February. One thousand Indian Americans, asked to describe their lives in this country. The Carnegie Endowment published the numbers, and I read them the way I read most things about us: looking for the part they got wrong, and the part they got right. One in two reported experiencing discrimination in…
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My First AI Boo Boo
I should have known better. I am, after all, the woman who slid down a snowy road and walked up to her home in a snow storm. The pattern is clear: Lakshmi plus technology plus overconfidence equals wreckage. Here is what happened. I was redesigning my website. The plan was simple. Consolidate everything on Substack…
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What the machine finds, and what it cannot
The prologue of my memoir is five sentences long. Two paragraph-sized fragments, separated by a row of dots. A family in a restaurant turns to look at us. I hold the woman’s eyes for a moment and look away. I wish I could tell them our story. Then a section break. Then: That is the…
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The Folder Named Essays
The folder on my desktop is named Essays. Two decades of a blog, poured into one container and set in front of me to be judged. I opened it sometime last month with the intention of finding a book. What I found instead was a woman I had mostly forgotten: twenty-five, new to Pennsylvania, writing…