Open source · TypeScript
Durably
Local-first durable execution for scripts and AI workflows. Resume after interruption without operating a server or queue.
Engineer · researcher · writer
Writing about reliable AI systems.
I’m Nikhil Verma, CTO of The Non-Functional Co. I write about agents, engineering constraints, and AI for regulated finance. About me →
Projects & apps
Open source · Web + CLI
SlopSift
A local-first NLP linter for structural AI writing tells, built on the WritingLint engine.
iPhone app · Free
Portmanteau
A calm feed of words worth knowing that adapts to your curiosity on-device.
Research · LLM agents
Active Context Compression
Autonomous agent memory with 22% fewer tokens on SWE-bench Lite and no loss of accuracy.
Writing & thoughts
-
Passing taste to AI models
AI models write like an overly confident human who has never failed in life. These are the instructions, examples, checker loops, and code constraints I use to make them follow my taste, including where they still fail.
-
The Constraint Spectrum: how the made earns the trust of the born
Generation is cheap now and verification is the bottleneck. A field guide to the constraints that make AI-written software trustworthy, at every phase of the SDLC you already know.
-
How I'd do engineering for the next year
Between December 2025 and July 2026, AI agents stopped asking me for the next step. What changed, where the trend is going, and how I'm changing the way I build software to get ahead of it.
-
How I am using Vue with Typescript 7 today
Write Vue components in plain TSX: you keep the reactivity system that makes Vue great, and TypeScript 7 type-checks them natively, today.
-
Building a harness that makes a small LLM reliable
Getting reliable, side-effecting tool use out of a small, cheap model (Haiku 3) by investing in the harness rather than the model — ref proxies that make hallucinated IDs impossible, and tool contracts that make skipping a required step impossible.
-
Rate limiting LLM APIs across distributed workers
Token-per-minute limits refill gradually, so backing off past ~60 seconds is just wasted time. A three-layer pattern for rate limiting LLM APIs across distributed workers: shared pause state, jittered resume, and a single retry owner.
-
When your reverse proxy becomes the problem
An in-container NGINX broke SSE streaming, corrupted auth responses, and blocked cluster mode. Why I pulled it out, what had to be rebuilt in-process, and where compression actually belongs.
-
Why nested JSON will eventually bite you
Deeply nested JSON makes per-node jobs unaddressable and partial loads impossible. Flatten to one row per node with order and indent integers, then rebuild hierarchy with SQL range queries or a single O(n) pass.
-
Agents should be able to time travel
AI Agents are stuck with a single chain of thought. If can be encouraged to traverse different paths, learn from them, and go back in time with the learnings. That would be cool.
-
LLMs as unreliable narrators: dealing with UUID hallucination
LLMs often fabricate UUIDs in RAG pipelines. Learn two production-ready strategies - enum constraints and token aliasing - to cut hallucination rates and stabilize multi-turn reasoning.
-
Moving from React to Vue? Here's what to expect
I moved from a React to a Vue project two years ago from a company change. If you are about to...
-
Why are you testing?
You might already have some quick answers in mind for this question. I totally get it - I do...
-
From Vue 2 to 3: a long journey
TL;DR This is a long post detailing my journey of migrating a project from Vue 2 to 3. It...
-
XPaths in the modern age
XPath selectors offer powerful querying capabilities but face compatibility challenges with modern web technologies like Web Components and Vue 3.
-
From tool to process: integrating visual regression testing into team workflow
How I converted PhantomCSS from a single-user tool into an integrated part of our team's workflow, covering challenges from CI integration to test execution optimization.
-
Using regular expressions to hack our way towards AMDfication
How we used the power of regular expressions to speed up our migration from a global namespace pattern to AMD modules (RequireJS), automating the conversion of 400+ files in Badoo's MobileWeb project.
-
5 advanced JavaScript and web debugging techniques you should know about
Master five powerful debugging techniques that web developers can use to reduce debugging time and squash challenging bugs: Weinre, DOM Breakpoints, the debugger statement, hooking native methods, and mapping remote scripts locally.
-
Fixed headers in mobile webapps
Overcome the challenges of implementing fixed headers in mobile web apps by hiding the address bar, removing interaction delays, and preventing unwanted page scrolling when using form inputs.
Going back further than that: a site I built in 2004, aged 17. Black background, Comic Sans, a Spider-Man image map, and twenty Flash files that still run. Then nine Photoshop tutorials I wrote in 2005 and 2006, rescued from two sites that took them down.