I'm an engineer. I like building developer tools and consumer software, and I care about how things look and feel. If a product doesn't care about the details, I'll leave for one that does.
I spent three years at Arcium, a cryptography startup building infrastructure for private AI. I joined as the third employee while still at BITS Pilani and did a bit of everything. I've cared about privacy since I was a kid. That's what got me into cryptography.
I think consumer AI is still early. Most of it is a chat box stuck on top of an app. I'd rather the app itself got smarter, so everyone ends up with a version that fits how they use it. Lately I've been reading a lot about mechanistic interpretability.
Recently I built Lightbox, a Claude Code plugin that shows the images you paste as previews, and gpu-color, a tiny model that turns a colour name into a hex code in your browser.
I read crime thrillers (send me recommendations), listen to a lot of music, travel when I can, and play video games.
Say hi on X, or email arihant dot bansal at gmail.