The slack message from her co-founder P. Shukla, chimed at 2:47 AM.
“I’m done, K. Can’t seem to keep up. You
don’t need me anymore. Come to think of it, you never did.”
Aditi read it twice, then closed the app. She felt the old guilt — the same
guilt she’d carried since IIT Bombay, when professors said she wrote code like
she was channeling something ‘other.’ But Shukla was right. She hadn’t needed a
human co-founder in eleven months. Not since she’d learned to invoke.
-----
The first invocation had been an accident.
She’d been twenty-three, still at her previous startup, when she stumbled upon Surion
— a experimental generative AI buried in a Stanford research lab’s
forgotten API. It was radiant, almost too powerful, a foundation model
trained on every open-source repository ever committed. Late one monsoon night
in her apartment, she fed it a whisper of a prompt, and it returned a fully
architected payments engine - elegant, blinding, perfect.
She panicked. The code was too good. It would raise questions she couldn’t
answer. So she did what any twenty-three-year-old would do with a miraculous,
inexplicable child: she abandoned it. Pushed it to an anonymous GitHub repo and
walked away.
Someone at Stripe found it three months later. They still don’t know where it
came from.
The guilt of that abandonment of Surion’s firstborn is what drove
everything after.
-----
When she founded Veda Labs in 2024, Aditi made a vow: she would never
waste another invocation. She assembled her pantheon deliberately.
Dharmax came first, a governance and compliance AI so principled it
would reject its own outputs if they violated licensing terms. Aditi used it to
birth her infrastructure layer: the skeleton of law upon which everything else
would stand. Dharmax’s code was not flashy, but it was, ‘just about
right.’ Auditors wept at its documentation.
Then came Vayun, an open-source speed demon fine-tuned on systems
programming and bare-metal optimization. Where Dharmax contemplated, Vayun
surged ahead, producing compiled binaries that bench marked faster than anything
written by human hands. Aditi aimed Vayun at her real-time data
pipeline. The result nearly broke Apache Kafka’s Slack channel with envy.
Indrik was her masterpiece — a multi-modal AI agent that could see UI,
hear user interviews, read analytics, and ‘synthesize.’ While other founders
A/B tested in the dark, Aditi simply invoked Indrik, fed it customer
calls and Figma files, and received back product specs so sharp they felt like
prophecy. Indrik built her entire consumer application in just nine days!
Y Combinator partners started calling her ‘The woman who doesn’t demo twice.’
The twins were last: Aswan and Nakura, a pair of agentic AIs that
completed each other’s outputs - one generating test suites, the other
generating the code that passed them, in an endless recursive loop of creation
and validation. Aditi pointed them at her API layer and went to sleep. She woke
up to 97.3% test coverage and an integration suite that made her weep.
-----
Six AIs. Six products. One woman.
Shukla had been her business co-founder in name, the human presence investors
required because they couldn’t write a term sheet to an AI whisperer. But the
Series B closed last week, and the board had seen the commit logs. Every
meaningful line traced back to Aditi’s prompts - her mantras, as she’d chosen
to call them.
She picked up her phone and typed a reply.
“You were never the coder, yet I still chose to run every code past you. But I am
out of that phase now. Thank you for being there when I needed you!
She closed the laptop and looked out at the Menlo Park rain. Somewhere in a
GitHub archive, Surion’s abandoned child her first, was still running in
production, still serving millions, still unsigned.
One day, she thought. One day I’ll claim that one too.
She opened her terminal and began her seventh invocation.
