After 9 years, I’m back setting up a devbox — this time with AI

The last time I wrote production code was in 2016. At Qwiklabs we ran on Ruby on Rails. Before that, I spent years in C++ and PHP.

At Credibl, our smart sustainability stack now spans three platforms:

• ESG data management & reporting (180+ enterprise customers)

• Traceability (1.5B+ finished units tracked)

• Climate Risk assessment (our newest, built in collaboration with Deloitte)

Early on, Parth picked the Elixir + Phoenix stack — proven at scale from his StumbleUpon days. I had never written functional code, so I avoided digging in… until now.

What excites me most is the Climate Risk platform. It crunches petabytes of NetCDF data, keeps SSP & NGFS scenarios fresh, and applies AI across workflows — a fascinating computer science challenge. I have worked with large datasets before - even as a student at USC I did work on the enron email dataset.

This week, while in Europe(Paris->London->Madrid) meeting customers and partners, I took on a stretch goal:

• Set up my devbox

• Explore the Climate Risk codebase

• Use AI tooling (Warp + Cursor in VS Code) to accelerate onboarding

The experience has been super smooth:

• Warp made the terminal feel intuitive again

• Cursor helped me parse the Elixir and TypeScript codebase quickly — as long as I gave it detailed business context

• Without AI, this would’ve been painful

  
  

New goal: My first git commit to Climate Risk by end of November 2025.

Its an amazing time to build software. I will keep posting my learnings here.