# The Oblivious Robot

> A blog by Dr. Debasish Pattanayak on distributed algorithms, swarms of robots, research and writing with AI.

Posts are Markdown files. Text is marked by who wrote it: `by-human` (the author's own words), `by-collab` (the author's ideas written up by AI) and `by-ai` (written by AI). Everything is licensed under CC BY 4.0: share and adapt it, with credit. Details: https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/license.md

## Posts

- [Building a classroom from scratch in GitHub](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/after-github-classroom.md): GitHub Classroom shut down, so a 530-student C++ lab runs on secret per-student teams, template repositories, issues and a go label. Why a cron timer could not be trusted, and the limit nobody reports. (published 2026-10-27, updated 2026-10-27)
- [The era of personal software](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/personal-software.md): In one evening, an AI coding agent and a handful of complaints turned a Pixel Watch into an iPhone accessory that feeds Apple Health. Software for an audience of one. (published 2026-10-27, updated 2026-10-27)
- [The Death of Big O Notation](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/death-of-big-o.md): Big O hides a constant and a threshold. Models now shave exponents that never run; the next frontier is the constants: ultra fine-grained complexity. (published 2026-10-12, updated 2026-10-12)
- [Mapping the Frontier Before the Models Arrive](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/mobility-matters.md): How Mobility Matters, a living survey of open problems on mobile agents, robots and particles, is built, and whom it serves: newcomers, returning researchers, and the coming model-made results. (published 2026-10-12, updated 2026-10-12)
- [203 Errors and One Semicolon](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/semicolon.md): A CS103 recap as a three-minute Bollywood music video, made for fun in 11 hours over the midsem break: Suno, ChatGPT character sheets, a shader engine and an AI coding agent. (published 2026-10-06, updated 2026-10-06)
- [Writing Papers When Your Co-author* Has No Memory†](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/co-author-with-no-memory.md): A checklist for writing research papers with an AI co-author: literature search, glossary, phrase bank, structure, polish and compression, and where AI helps at each step. (published 2026-09-26, updated 2026-10-06)
- [Why did I start blogging again?](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/why-did-i-start-blogging-again.md): Why I started blogging again, what to expect here, and why this blog is called The Oblivious Robot. (published 2026-09-26, updated 2026-09-26)

## Pages

- [About](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/about.md): Dr. Debasish Pattanayak: distributed algorithms for swarms of robots, and a swarm of students.
- [License](https://drdebmath.github.io/blog/posts/license.md): Everything on this blog is licensed under CC BY 4.0: share and adapt it, with credit.