Arun Anderson builds practical agentic AI.

411 attempts, then the app was blocked.

It all started with one pre-loaded app on my Android phone, quietly sending data somewhere I couldn’t see. I wanted to block it. What followed was 411 attempts at flashing recoveries — TWRP, CWM, brute-force combinations, bricking and recovering the phone, then trying again. On the 411th attempt, I finally got through. The app was blocked.

The pattern continued

The next time, I wanted to download data from a public website. It was spread across 40 pages, and every page meant clicking through, copying and pasting several sections by hand. I wanted to scrape the entire site in one go, so I built my first scraper. More than 300 attempts later, it finally worked.

The pattern was the same. I don’t confuse the first failed approach with a failed idea.

Between customers and code.

The professional version of me looked different on paper — technical support, project management, customer success. But it was the same pattern wearing a lanyard.

Every role put me in the space between. Customers on one side, describing what they needed, usually in the language of frustration. Engineers on the other, asking what exactly to build. I became the translator: I'd sit with the problem until I could say it plainly, then carry it across as something a team could ship.

For years, that was the job. Seeing the thing clearly — and handing the building to someone else.