Years ago, my mentor Vikram at allthingsvedic.in told me something that has never quite left me: we keep learning in layers. Nothing arrives whole. You add a layer, let it settle, and only later add the next.
It keeps resonating — because now I can see it. Watching Claude work, I notice it quietly bringing together all the small, scattered tools I built over many, many years. Little things I had half-forgotten. Each one was a layer. None of them felt like much on its own.
This is also what Venky keeps saying — the power of compounding. The layers don't add up; they multiply. The worth was never in the last tool. It was in all of them, finally connected.
So here is the inkling: two ideas handed to me years apart — Vikram's layers, Venky's compounding — and I'm finally understanding them. Not through Jyotish, not through markets, but through the lens of AI system architecture. The lesson was always the same. Only the classroom changed.