about

I'm preparing for the civil services, which is a slower and quieter kind of work than the one I used to do.

When I'm not studying, I'm writing. Mostly trying to get better at saying exactly what I mean.

I spent a while writing code. I liked the part where a problem became small enough to hold in my head, and the part where the solution was mine.

I stopped in March. A lot of it was the feeling that programming had turned into prompting: less writing code, more waiting for a model to write it. The fun went out of it.

Before I stopped, a lot of my time went into competitive programming. I solved over 1,200 problems on LeetCode, peaked above 2,200, and was ranked in the top 500 in India.

Most of that history lives on LeetCode as pathakkmehul, with p4n1c as the alt.