Notes from building things: internships, hackathons, fine-tuning models on my own texts, and the occasional brainrot.

featured · 20 min read · nov 2025
Almost Anselm: Cloning my Telegram Personality by Fine Tuning an LLM
I fine-tuned Mistral-7b with Axolotl on Telegram messages.
Read it →2026
Ava: How I Code Now (Mostly From Telegram)My agentic setup: a Hermes agent on a $12 VPS that takes an idea from a Telegram message all the way to a deployed site on my own domain.agentshermestelegramvercel12 Weeks at Visa: Building a Retrieval-Augmented Investigation Assistant12 weeks at Visa, watching the largest payment network in the world manage 80000 transactions a second. I built SAGE, a retrieval-augmented assistant to help operators investigate incidents faster.ragvisainternshipretrievalBuilding a Retrieval-Augmented Incident Investigation AssistantThe full technical report from my Visa internship: designing and building SAGE, a retrieval-augmented incident investigation assistant for the VIP Coverage team.visaraginternshipllmBuilding AEGISWhat I learnt building a controlled AI-access platform for a CTF, and why handover does not mean letting go.aicybersecurityctfragReplicating ConfessIT: Fine-Tuning Qwen 2.5 7B on 72K Anonymous ConfessionsAnother stupid fine-tuning project. This time on the average ConfessIT user.fine tuningunslothnustelegramWhat 72,000 Confessions Reveal About NUS StudentsScraping over 72,000 confessions from 18,000 users: A deep dive into the embedding landscape, viral dynamics, and thematic structure of NUSConfessIT.machine learningdata analysisnustelegramshitpost.anselmlong.comi made a thing that generates absurd linkedin posts so you don't have to.side projectnext.jsaihumorOpen-Sourcing My Cheatsheets: Why I Still Write Them by HandEven though AI is great for learning, sometimes it's best to get into the nitty gritty and write out a cheatsheet yourself. I decided to open source mine to help others!learningopen-sourceeducationlatexCanvas Scraper: A 3-Hour Prototype That Turned Into A Daily ToolI was lazy to click buttons, so I built a Canvas file sync tool. Now I actually use it.nusautomationscrapingpythonHack & Roll 2026: Building Optifiner, a Multi-Agent, Evolutionary FrameworkWe built a self-evolving agentic code optimizer. Also: the welfare was insane.hackathonagentsevolutionaryproductNUS Aircon Checker: Reverse Engineering A Flutter Portal (With Opencode)I reverse engineered an API from a website with oh-my-opencode.nusautomationreverse-engineeringtelegramGemini 3 Hackathon: Building Sequence, an AI powered Video EditorBuilding Sequence, an AI-powered video editor at the Gemini 3 Hackathon.hackathonvideo processinggemini
2025
Evaluating ChatSelm: Comparing Human and LLM ResponsesEvaluating my fine-tuned LLM (almost-anselm) against prompts, comparing its responses to mine and seeing if my friends can spot the difference.llmaxolotlqloramistralAlmost Anselm: Cloning my Telegram Personality by Fine Tuning an LLMI fine-tuned Mistral-7b with Axolotl on Telegram messages.llmaxolotlqloramistralGesture Detection with YOLOv8: Brainrot EditionRecognising gestures with YOLOv8 and pulling up brainrot images based on that...YOLOv8computer visionroboflowpythonPredicting Employee Turnover with Random ForestEnd-to-end pipeline: preprocessing, modeling, and interpretation for predicting employee turnover (best F1 ≈ 0.74 with Random Forest).machine-learningrandom forestpytorchscikit-learnfreak-cha36 hours. 8 hours of sleep. no showers. Funniest Hack at HackHarvard 2025.hackathonnext.jstailwind csscomputer visionMaking anselmlong.com: The Agentic UpgradeEnhancing my portfolio website to do more stuff. Agentic.langgraphMaking anselmlong.comFinally got off my ass and tried to build something.next.jstypescriptRAGlangchain.jsWhat did I do during my Y1 summer intern? Googling... lots of itMy first internship at IMDA wasn't very technical but I still learnt a lot!pythonresearchbs4First blog post, kinda nervousJoin me on my process to uncook myself! First blog post - I'll backdate other earlier posts.personalportfoliointroCreating a gift chooser for my girlfriendPracticing my frontend with a small webpage dedicated to my girlfriend's birthdaypersonalnext.jstailwind cssManaging the distance with Python and Telegram BotsLong distance sucks! I created a telegram bot with Python to help the distance feel less far :)personalpythontelegram botMachine Learning for Cybersecurity Use CasesMy final report for my machine learning intern! I think I was quite comprehensive here. Recreated it in markdown for easier reading but I'll attach the PDF version inside too!machine-learningcybersecurityinternshipdata-scienceData and a DreamProbably my most tech-focused experience to date. I had 3 months and 1 priority - to detect which web certificates were malicious and which weren't. All I had was data and a dream...pythonmachine learningscikit-learnanomaly detectionMiccdrop: a shitty karaoke appHack and Roll 2025hackathonsupabasereact native