Sarath Tharayil
v. learning · noticing · becoming
I build things with data and code, usually end-to-end. I ship side projects at odd hours, care a lot about how things feel to use, and tend to go deep on whatever has my attention. lately that's been AI systems, and ideas that doesn't sound terrible.
Writing
All posts
Teaching a model to know me How I built Metis, a personal AI that answers questions about my background and projects. What RAG actually is, why it beats fine-tuning for this problem, and the specific choices I made building it on Astro with HuggingFace.
March 4, 2026 Stealing intelligence without stealing weights A deep dive into model distillation, extraction attacks, and recent stories from deployed AI systems. How models learn and how 'that learning' leaks.
February 26, 2026
Current obsession
I wanted a calmer way to track my life than Notion's LifeOS. So I'm building Continuum , a quiet dashboard for time, energy, mood, and progress, shaped around real days instead of templates.