Ep 1 - Vedang Manerikar of Unravel Tech on nurturing AI builders

Vedang Manerikar (co-founder, Unravel.Tech; ex-Helpshift, head of backend) believes AI builders still need to learn engineering fundamentals. He joins Naman to unpack: Why services beats product in the agentic era How veterans of 15+ years spot AI talent The rule that anchors his AI philosophy: never ask an agent to do something you don't know how to do yourself Unravel's $200/employee Claude Code budget and Friday lightning talks How the hiring loop evolved from week-long takehomes to a split assignment with live pair programmingPlus war stories — the non-CS hire who struggled for three months then turned into one of the best engineers Vedang ever worked with, and his first fire as a manager. We close with a live walkthrough of Vedang's 30-minute Python/Redis assessment on Utkrusht.About the Bar Raiser podcastHiring is being rewritten in the age of AI. Each episode, Naman Muley, Founder and CEO at utkrusht.ai, sits down with engineering leaders who actually own headcount budgets and interview loops to dig into what they're seeing change — how teams use AI day-to-day, what signals still matter in candidates, and how the definition of a "good hire" is shifting. Every guest also takes a live assessment, and we review it together on air.Show notes Vedang's Programming Guide: https://vedang.me/programmer-guide/