About me

I’m Roshan Mishra. I am a programmer and writer based in Bangalore. I’ve worked on AI SaaS products, recommendation engines, and other projects over the last decade, in medium size tech companies, start-up edtech and non-profit firms.

Right now, I’m interested in building AI products and helping people understand how systems work. I like to be involved from the decision stage and to question how the solution actually works. Suppose that you had a document question-answering app.

• Could you run it on the page you’re reading right now and see what happens?
• What are the assumptions that people bring to their design?
• How does the system find an answer to a question?
• How does it verify that the answer is accurate?
• How does it know which documents to try?
• What if there is no answer?
• What does the user see while it is working on figuring out the answer?

It turns out that it is hard to test an AI product by making a few guesses and looking at the results. Even if you do build one, it is hard to know whether it works without looking at many examples and thinking about what is going on under the hood.

So I prefer to start with a small version of the thing that you are thinking of building, so that we can look at it and examine what it does. If the AI adds little, I’ll tell you and recommend simpler software. If the AI is helping you and the product is working well on the examples that we try, then perhaps it is worth building a larger version.

I enjoy teaching because I like working through a project, step-by-step, to see where explanations fail to give a clear picture. One practical difficulty in introducing AI to knowledge work is that most people aren’t thinking about programming these days.

Understanding one common type of error that AI coding tools make gives someone more concrete understanding of how they work than a general discussion. For that matter, wanting students to examine AI output rather than taking it as a given also forces me to examine my own understanding of the foundations that I am trying to cover.

My articles and notes are another place where I work through these questions. If you’d like to work with me, get in touch.