Anand Ramanathan

Builder · Applied AI Engineer · Indie Developer

Personalized, local-first AI for end users - at work, home, or anywhere.

Privacy-focused experiences for individual end users. Local-first where it makes sense, hosted when it doesn't. Daily power user of Claude Code well beyond coding. Twenty years of shipping ideas before they became mainstream.

10+Products
68Comics
9Kindle Books
78Blog Posts
1M+Quora Views
20+Years
01

Highlights

What I do
02

How I Build

Core tenets
Personalized

human end user focused

End-user focus over enterprise, B2B, or financial verticals. Every product serves an individual person - not a department, not a deal pipeline.

Local-First

Your data on your machine

Local-first AI where possible (Apple MLX, Ollama, on-device models), hosted when it makes sense. Maibook, ahai, and the Haixu pipelines all run on the user's hardware.

Privacy

Privacy by default

No telemetry harvested for ads, no accounts that extract you. Tools that respect that you own your data and your attention.

Skill

Claude Code, super-expert level

Daily power user of Claude Code well beyond coding - for knowledge work, multi-agent design, content pipelines, and Obsidian-as-second-brain workflows. Building agents that build with agents.

Pattern

Often early

Twenty years of independently arriving at ideas before they became mainstream - no-code platforms, visual knowledge graphs, multi-LLM councils, AI-driven personal knowledge bases. See the pattern ↓

03

Ahead of the Curve

Built before mainstream

A pattern across two decades: independently arriving at ideas that later became widely adopted. Not always first to be famous, but often first to ship.

No-code before "no-code"

Meon · 2015

A fully-hosted, build-anything-without-code web platform - shipped with 25 product demos - years before Webflow and Bubble propelled no-code into the mainstream wave.

Visual knowledge graphs

Deeppage & Thouwords

Multimodal knowledge-graph layers over web content - the same pattern Google later popularized for entities like movies, places, and people in search results.

AI-generated illustrated books

Pikodo → Haixu

Comics-from-Wikipedia (Pikodo, pre-LLM) and 68+ AI-illustrated visual guides plus 9 Kindle books (Haixu, 2024) - shipped before AI-generated illustrated books became a Gumroad and Amazon Kindle category.

Multi-LLM councils

"Social network for AIs"

Built a private experiment where multiple local models picked tasks from diverse domains, debated, judged each other, and scored outputs - the same core pattern that Karpathy's open-source LLM Council (Nov 2025) later made famous.

AI second brains in Obsidian

Claude Code × Obsidian

Heavy Claude Code workflows against personal Obsidian vaults - generating master indexes, concept maps, linked notes, and personalized just-in-time interfaces - before Karpathy's LLM Wiki (Apr 2026) crystallized the pattern.

Now

Maibook · 2026

"Your third brain" - an ongoing local AI feed of personalized agents that expand on your activity. The current chapter, building on every pattern above. maibook.app →

04

Featured Products

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2026 · Now Available · Free for a limited time

Maibook - Your Third Brain

A private community of personalized AI agents expanding on your every activity, responding to your every request - on-device on your Mac or Windows PC. Local-first by design. My current focus and the flagship of MLAI LLC.

"The second brain is an AI snapshot of you. The third brain is an ongoing AI live-streaming feed of your activity."

maibook.app Get Maibook Docs
2025

Claude Code CLI Viewer

Dark-mode viewer for Claude Code CLI sessions. Browse, search, and visualize AI coding sessions in a rich UI. Launched on Hacker News.

Gumroad
2024 – Present

Haixu - AI Educational Comics

LLM-based pipeline creating visual guides. 68+ comics on Gumroad, 9 books on Kindle. Spanning science, history, culture, technology.

Gumroad Kindle
2025

ahai - Local AI Idea Discovery

Native Mac app using Apple MLX to scan markdown files and surface forgotten ideas. 100% local, privacy-first.

ahai.app
05

Latest Writing

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Building something interesting? Want to collaborate on AI, products, or learning tools?

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