Uses — Jatin Alla

Hardware

What sits on the desk.

A small kit that has stopped surprising me — which is what I want from a tool. I would rather a thing I have used a thousand times than the better thing I have used twice.

Sony a7iii — one body, one strap, one habit. In the bag every day on the chance the light does something.
A single Zeiss prime — fixed focal length, no zoom. The constraint does most of the composition for me.
A Windows workstation with an RTX PRO 6000 (96GB). It runs vLLM locally — Qwen, Nemotron, Hermes — so that anything sensitive does not leave the room.
A Shure dynamic mic through a small interface, and closed-back headphones. The mic forgives a noisy room, which is the only kind of room I record in.

Software

What is open most of the day.

Everything is plain text until it has to be something else. The fewer apps I rely on, the fewer apps I have to grieve when they change.

.md files in folders, and Zed when I want a real editor. No notes app, no second brain. The folder is the brain.
CLI agents — Claude Code most days, plus a small set of local scripts. The terminal is the workbench; the editor is the worktable.
Local models via vLLM for anything I do not want to send to a vendor — transcript analysis, framework queries, the slow private thinking. ChromaDB underneath holds the framework corpus.
ElevenLabs Pro, Hume AI Octave, and Dia 1.6B for podcast voice work — paid for the cloud quality, local for the iterations I do not need to pay per-attempt for.
Descript for editing episodes — the transcript-as-timeline is the only interface that has ever made editing audio feel like editing prose.

Methods

What I lean on to think.

These are not beliefs. They are lenses. I keep them because each one shows me something the others do not, and because the cohort keeps finding pieces of themselves in them.

Gene Keys — daily contemplations, mostly. A patient frame for what is becoming versus what is contracted.
Enneagram — for type-level pattern, especially under stress. Less a personality theory than a stress-response one.
Internal Family Systems — for parts work. The most useful single move I have learned for hearing what is underneath a reaction.
Somatic practices — orienting, titration, the slow stuff. The body keeps the score; sometimes the body also keeps the answer.
The chakra system — as a map of where attention is held, not as metaphysics. Useful for noticing what part of a person is doing the talking.

Daily practice

What the day is built on.

Small, unglamorous, mostly the same. The point is not the practice. The point is the steadiness underneath whatever else is on fire.

Coffee, and either a few minutes of breathing or a long look in the mirror. One of those two — sometimes both. It is the part of the morning where I find out who showed up.
A camera in the bag. Not to make pictures. To stay in the habit of looking up. Some days I do not take a single frame; the looking still counts.
Papers, mostly on AI development and its effects on people. What the models are becoming, and what they are doing to attention, intimacy, loneliness, work. Some are excellent. Many are not. Both are useful.

A page like this only ages well if I update it when it stops being true. If something here is out of date, that is a fair thing to email me about.