The story behind
the site

I am Harsha Chittar. Everyone's heard of Foundry, Nikhil Kamath's initiative to build new entrepreneurs and brands. I was excited about an Indian Y Combinator and dreamed of getting into Foundry.

I applied and took their online test. One question stood out: "How do you use AI in your life?" I'd used ChatGPT to build a workout tracker app, which I thought was a big deal. In reality, it was a GPT wrapper that helped plan and schedule workouts, then log them manually. At that point, my experience with AI was limited to ChatGPT, and I was unaware of the broader landscape of AI technologies. I had no idea what else was out there. I didn't get through Foundry.

Around the same time, I was talking to a good friend, Matt Datillo, who had arranged a conversation with his CTO, Alyson Rixner, a highly accomplished and warm leader. They spoke of embracing AI, and Matt urged me to look at Claude. I dismissed it as another ChatGPT without trying it. However, one day I thought it was arrogant of me to dismiss this, and I decided to learn about AI properly. That started my journey of learning.

I used Claude extensively and created many HTML artifacts. Excited, I moved on to Gemini, which I'd only opened twice to generate trending images. Gemini was a great experience. I was curious, what is AI? What's an LLM? How does it work? I spent days listening to YouTube videos by 3Blue1Brown and Andrej Karpathy.

I honestly felt small and ignorant for dismissing technology that was changing Corporate India, America, and the world. I started taking notes on my understanding and simplifying everything I learned. One day, I had the idea to turn them into a blog. Sitting in front of my laptop, I thought, "Why can't I build a website?" That would be a real test of embracing the AI world. Thus, probablyacomputer.com was born.

Bengaluru. Where this all started.

The name is uncanny, but it relates to my childhood, spent thinking "probably a computer" without stopping to understand what was behind it. It's a homage to the 90s, when things seemed overwhelming but simpler in context.

This is me sharing what I've learned and used, in simple language. If you're a beginner or novice, you may chuckle and say, "Oh, that's how it works." If you are an expert, you may walk away laughing, "It is not that simple." The idea is to introduce AI to humans who identify as beginners and are curious about it.

The site has Cards, quick reads that introduce AI concepts, tools, and apps. Blogs are longer reads about my experiments, experiences with tools and AI apps. Prompts is a page where I try to recreate or simplify overwhelming concepts, like Claude Code or Agentic workflows.

This is me. By the end of this journey, my hope is to become ProbablyaNerd.