I'm Nikhil. I taught myself everything I know, mostly by ruining things and starting them over until they worked. I work as a Design Engineer and an AI-native builder. The first means the design file and the codebase open in the same window. The second means AI is part of the toolchain, not the pitch. The handoff between disciplines is a meeting I never had to schedule.

I run DRAEV STUDIOS, a one-person product studio. The studio designs and ships AI-native applications, from the first wireframe to the v1 invoice. Clients are founders who want their product to feel like someone cared.

In the last fourteen weeks I've shipped thirty-four projects. A pixel-art RPG that teaches personal finance. A Claude Code workspace that thinks like an a16z partner with cited theses. A memory layer for AI tools with 279 tests and 88% line coverage. A personal AI agent that ships software from a Telegram message and writes none of the code itself. And a compliance SaaS for founders, with Razorpay running the billing. The list is the practice. Most days I'd rather ship one more than write one more thinkpiece.

My operating discipline is research-first. Don't invent. Decode. Before I build, I find the masters who already solved the problem. Usually in their books. Sometimes in a deep podcast appearance nobody's listened to in two years. Their patterns end up cited in the README. Every project links to the source.

Two years as Creative Director at Clanflare before this. Currently designing at KEY Difference. Writing, when I get around to it, about what one person with AI can actually build before craft becomes the only moat that's left.

Books and reps. That's the whole system.