The
Kohai
Real problems, solved with software. We find the developer, run the interview, and publish what actually happened — the messy middle included.
She turned her grandmother’s recipe notebooks into a Claude-powered search engine
Three Sunday afternoons, 240 pages of Tamil-English shorthand, and a single prompt that learned her family’s way of measuring “a little salt.” We sat down with Aanya to walk through the build.
Software that solved
something personal.
Rohan Mehta’s terminal todo list reads his GitHub activity to plan his week
A Pune backend engineer built a 180-line CLI that turns his last seven days of commits into Monday’s priorities. The result lives in his shell. No app, no notifications.
A Chennai indie hacker built a Tamil-English code review tool over three weekends
Karthik Subramanian wanted his team’s junior devs to read review comments in their first language without losing precision. We walked through the system he ended up with.
Why Priya Shah deleted her note-taking app and replaced it with one Claude prompt
The Ahmedabad designer’s eight-line prompt now handles meeting notes, weekly recaps, and a fairly aggressive opinion about her writing voice. Here’s the prompt.
Inside Vihaan Kapoor’s 200-line Go script that runs his entire freelance business
Invoicing, contract drafts, follow-ups, monthly reports — all of it from one file on his laptop. He showed us the parts he’s embarrassed about, which were the parts we found most useful.
Anjali Rao’s experiment: letting Claude triage her open-source maintainer inbox
After 9,000 GitHub notifications in a year, she started over. The new system labels, summarises, and writes draft replies. She still presses send.
A Vadodara dev shipped a working SaaS on ₹0 of cloud spend by leaning on local LLMs
“You don’t need a GPU to start.” A quiet writeup of the architecture, the trade-offs, and the moment one of her customers asked how it was so fast.
Saurabh Joshi’s weekend project that helps his mother run her tailoring business
Order book on an iPad, voice notes in Gujarati, automatic reminders before festival deadlines. He sent us photos of the actual workshop.
A short, unscientific test: Cursor vs. Claude Code on the same boring refactor
Four developers, one 4,000-line legacy file, two tools. We logged what worked, what didn’t, and what surprised us about each of them.
The tools we're
actually using every day
Not a directory, not a leaderboard — tools that showed up in our stories because someone used them to solve a real problem. If it made someone’s life measurably easier, it belongs here.
Claude
The model behind most of the prompts featured here.
Cursor
AI-first editor. Rohan and Vihaan both swear by the keyboard-only mode.
Ollama
Run open models on a laptop. Read the ₹0 SaaS story for a real-world setup.
Raycast
A keyboard launcher that quietly wraps a handful of Claude prompts.
Cloudflare Workers
Where the ₹0-cloud SaaS and the code review tool both live.
Whisper
Voice-note-to-text in eleven Indian languages, with surprising accuracy.
Obsidian
Local markdown vault. Most of our writers draft here first.
sqlite-utils
Tiny tool that quietly powers two of the projects we featured this month.
Using something we haven't covered? Tell us — we add tools to the box only after someone we've featured is actually using them.
About
The Kohai
Kōhai (後輩) is Japanese for the junior — the one still learning. It fit what we wanted this to be: a publication for developers comfortable not knowing everything yet.
The Kohai publishes stories about real problems that got solved with software. We find the developer, run the interview, and write down what actually happened.
We don't run launches. We don't rank tools. We don't crown anyone "developer of the year." We just sit with someone, ask what they're building this month, and write down what they tell us — the prompt that worked, the script that didn't, the late-night fix that finally clicked.
Curated by AI, edited by a human. Models surface story candidates from public commits, posts, and submissions. A person picks who to talk to, runs the interview, and edits every word before it ships. Nothing goes live unread.
All credit goes to The Kohai Editors — the rotating collective of writers, model-pairings, and friends who keep this thing publishing. Bylines stay collective on purpose; the work belongs to the developers we feature.