Aishwarya 'Ash' Srivastava

got into a LLM lab, working on latent space reasoning in llm architectures

first east coast winter and CMU visit; built an agentic scraper and shipped it on site

first SF hack; built an agentic workflow analytics tool and came home with a bigger fire

taught and wrote the LLM/RLHF-from-scratch notebooks; best way I learned production AI

won 2nd place; built rag based finetuning ml pipeline

joined rise lab HCI group; building transformer/vae architectures for trajectory prediction with human modeling

won 1st place; built social engineering ai voice agent

joined software developers association focusing on tech

ground-up freelance build; long hours shipping for a client taught real delivery pressure

turning point: daily LLM papers and experiments made AI the career path

sent a ton of on-campus apps, got crickets; doubled down on projects and papers instead

won an international hack with a student copilot; first real taste of team shipping

built Discord, Notion, and GCP integrations plus headless CMS sites for student orgs; dug deep into tooling

first startup attempt; ran community, ops, and product—learned by doing everything

won my first international hack; realized I liked building in public

dropped games after a family crisis; swapped hours into code and routines

quiet, often lost, but always trying to figure out how things worked