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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Building a 'second brain' for learning AI: what to actually write down

#productivity #career #learning

Most note-taking systems for a fast-moving field like GenAI turn into a graveyard of half-finished pages within a few months. The fix isn't a better app — it's a narrower, more deliberate scope.

What's worth writing down

  • A decision and its reasoning ('picked pgvector over a managed service because...') — these age well and are genuinely reusable.
  • A debugging story ('the model kept hallucinating dates until I added a confidence gate') — these teach more on reread than a summarised fact does.
  • A short, dated take on a fast-moving topic, explicitly flagged as likely to be outdated soon.

What to stop writing down

Copy-pasted documentation and tutorial summaries — these are one search away at any time and decay the moment the underlying tool updates. Your own reasoning and mistakes are the only notes that actually compound in value.

See writing your first technical blog post for turning these notes into something public.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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