February 2025. Picture it.
The AI world was still primordial soup — bubbling, ugly, unformed, more promise than product. Models were hallucinating like medieval monks who'd skipped breakfast. Half the industry was preaching salvation. The other half was packing bags for the bunker. And we at our company? We were standing somewhere in the middle, holding our coffees, wondering if any of this was actually going to cook.
Sree was the sceptic. Not the lazy, arms-folded kind — the considered, eyebrow-raised kind that good engineers carry around like a second wallet. He worried about hallucinations the way a parent worries about a teenager's new friends. Fair concerns. All of them.
And I — I was bouncing off the walls. Curious to the point of nuisance. I didn't even know what I wanted us to try. I just knew we had to try something. You know that restlessness? The kind that, if you let it sit too long, sours into regret? That was me. Properly itchy.
Now here's the thing, and pay attention — because this is the first quiet lesson buried in the story.
Sree didn't shut it down. He could have. Most leaders would have. He runs on a beautiful philosophy — strong opinions, loosely held — and in that moment what that meant was four small words: fine, go, experiment, show me. That's it. That's the whole permission slip. And let me tell you — that single act of unblocking is what every team in every company is secretly begging for. Most of them never get it.
So we picked our three. Niraj. Sreenath. Anish.
Tinkerers by nature. Opportunists by appetite. The kind of engineers who say yes to anything that involves new technology, a flight ticket, and a meal worth writing home about. Sreenath was based out of Hyderabad — a city where biryani meets shahi tukda, where every meal is a small ceremony, where the rice itself seems to know its own worth — so Hyderabad it was.
Now indulge me for a moment. (I always do this. Sree, you know I always do this.)
When I think of Hyderabad, I still think of a wedding I attended as a boy. A wedding that had to be postponed. Postponed — because the ustad-e-biryani fell ill. An entire wedding. Paused. Because the chef wasn't well. Two families. Hundreds of guests. Garlands wilting in the heat. A couple's life held in suspended animation, all because one man couldn't stand at his pot.
If the alchemy of one man's cooking can move the date of a couple's life, that is magic. And we should all be lucky enough to do work that magical at least once.
That single fact lit something up in me as a teenager. It's part of why I ended up chasing culinary pursuits myself.
Anyway. Back to the story.
Sree and I made a deliberate choice. We would not go. We would not hover. We would not Slack-poke every two hours asking for updates. We'd let the three of them disappear into an Airbnb, into the city, into each other's company, and into the work. Because bonding doesn't happen under a microscope. And breakthrough — breakthrough doesn't either.
But — and this is the part most leaders skip, so listen — we did define the outcome. Small. Almost trivial. But unambiguous. Rebuild the Lead Automation platform that was already being developed the old way, in parallel, with traditional SDLC. A natural A/B test. Old versus new. Human-only versus human-with-AI.
Without that outcome, the trip is a holiday. With it, the trip becomes an experiment.
And here's the second quiet lesson — the What doesn't always come before the How. Sometimes the outcome is what reveals the What to you. We've seen it again and again since.
So. What happened in that Airbnb over a day and a half?
This is now folklore.
They opened Cursor. They opened V0. They opened Lovable. They cracked open Claude Sonnet 3.5 — and then, somewhere in the middle of the hackathon, on a weekend, like a wizard switching wands mid-spell, Anthropic released 3.7. The model behaved wacky. The team rode it anyway. Riding a horse that's changing breed mid-gallop. (Sreenath, if you're reading this, you know exactly what I mean.)
By the end of 1.5 days they had a working happy-path of a complex Lead Automation platform.
No live DB. No error handling. White-coded. Fragile. Beautiful. Not production.
But undeniable.
This is when "vibe coding" entered our vocabulary. Until that weekend, we used AI for snippets. A function here. A regex there. In Hyderabad, three engineers prompted entire applications into existence. Greenfield. Glorious. Slightly terrifying. We learned the hard way later that vibe coding doesn't scale — that's a separate story, with Equal Experts and Satya and Harper Reed's blog and a whole reckoning called "What happens when greenfield becomes brownfield?" — but that's for another evening. Another whisky. Another room.
Now. A few moments are worth saving. The kind you don't put in slides.
Sreenath, weeks before the hackathon, cancelled his Valentine's Day plans. Cancelled. To sit with Bianca and push Cursor through InfoSec. Romance lost to paperwork. Paperwork won the future. We still owe that man a dinner. Probably with flowers.
We composed a song before the hackathon. I won't sing it here. (You're welcome.)
And after LA v4 finally shipped, Niraj and Sreenath became a two-person SWAT team. Moving across brand squads like a pack of wolves — Amadeus at Europe Express, Pallas at Yachts, Drupal reverse-engineering at Le Boat, NAM at Exodus. They show up. They change how you build. They leave.
That's the model now.
So. If I had to leave a few things behind from this story — not as a tidy little listicle but as quiet markers a colleague might pick up later — they would be these.
That weekend in Hyderabad didn't just produce a prototype. It produced a posture. A way of working with AI that has rippled through every squad we've touched since.
The biryani helped. The friendship helped. The model upgrade in the middle was either a curse or a gift, depending on which engineer you ask.
But the real ingredient — the unsung ustad in this whole story — was the simple decision by two people at the top to say:
Go. Try. Tell us what you find.
We'll be right here.
That's where AILA started.
Not in a slide deck.
In an Airbnb.
With biryani on the table.
And 3.7 in the air.