Rudrank's Dispatch: Intelligence.

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Rudrank’s Dispatch after more than two months! I have been building and writing more than ever, and I apologize for leaving this space quiet for a bit. But here I am, live from the land of dreams – San Francisco!

Since my last dispatch, I took up an obsession of writing. I wrote more than 50 blog posts trying to maintain a streak of writing every day from end of July, and I actually did it.

It was fun, but would I do it again? Maybe. One blog post a day felt like it was not enough, ha.

It is tough to pick the best ones, so I will let you in on the top most viewed:

• Exploring Swift 6: Static property 'shared' is not concurrency-safe because non-'Sendable' type may have shared mutable state

Exploring Swift 6: Static property ‘shared’ is not concurrency-safe because non-‘Sendable’ type may have shared mutable state

• Exploring Indie Life: Reducing Friction with Cursor

Exploring Indie Life: Reducing Friction with Cursor

• Exploring Cursor: Building and Running on Simulator

Exploring Cursor: Building and Running on Simulator

• Exploring WidgetKit: Creating Your First Control Widget in iOS 18 and SwiftUI

Exploring WidgetKit: Creating Your First Control Widget in iOS 18 and SwiftUI

• Exploring SwiftUI: Creating a Custom Slider Inspired By Camera Control

Exploring SwiftUI: Creating a Custom Slider Inspired By Camera Control

• Exploring Swift 6: Task-isolated value of type '() async -> ()' passed as a strongly transferred parameter; later accesses could race

Exploring Swift 6: Task-isolated value of type ‘() async -> ()’ passed as a strongly transferred parameter; later accesses could race

I recently won the #BuildInPublic Ship-a-ton award for a hackathon by RevenueCat! It was a 45-day challenge, and I built an app called Meshing, to quickly create mesh gradients.

https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ai-mesh-gradient-tool-meshing/id6567933550

I documented the journey on Twitter and daily vlogs on YouTube.

That win pushed me into a momentum of building and shipping, and now everyone’s asking, “What’s next for you, Rudrank?”

Honestly, I have no clue.

After losing my job in May, I turned to freelance work, which has been going well. Being an independent developer is hard, where hard is an understatement.

I know I love writing, but I am unsure if I still want to continue honing my iOS skills. I see iOS development more as a skill now rather than a career path.

As most of us, I have been drawn to the world of AI.

Sam Altman’s blog post about the Intelligence Age has been on my mind, and how my perception of the world shifted so much in just a year.

The Intelligence Age

• Can you believe it has been only three months since Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched??*

The next step for me is to dive into the world of intelligence. Right now, I am still on the consumer side, using the power of these LLMs, but I have not created anything meaningful with them yet.

Before I can impact others, I want to impact my own life first.

While in SF, surrounded by AI everywhere, I got this idea – why not build something that touches every part of my life?

I am calling it Rudrank Intelligence.

It will be a suite of AI agents working on different aspects of my life. Just yesterday, I was learning about how agents work, along with semantic search and embeddings.

There is a lot to learn, and I have a feeling October will be the month I write more Python than Swift. (And yes, I have never written in Python before, so I finally should get all the indentation jokes!)

I will be creating a separate tag called “Intelligence” on my website, where I will document my exploration and learn how to build these agents. Since iOS development is still part of my skill set, I want to have both iOS and macOS apps handling all these agents. I have no idea how easy or difficult this will be, but we will explore and figure it out.

Until then, keep building and shipping a ton!