Episode 7. Proof of Work as Insurance Part 2: Building Publicly with AI
"Putting things out there is scary. That is the honest truth. But when you go ahead and do that first, you realize that nobody here is judging you. They are looking for your intention of collaborating and sharing ideas."
Welcome back to Women Who Ship, the podcast for women in tech who are tired of proving themselves in rooms they have already earned a place in and are ready to lead like they know it. Today, we are diving into Part 2 of my conversation with the incredible Tanushree Panigrahy, founder of the Stay Ahead of the Curve Substack and community.
In this episode, Proof of Work as Insurance Part 2: Building Publicly with AI, we discuss the practical, real-world ways you can start building publicly with AI to actively build your courage and your career confidence.
Tanushree shares how she broke out of the stressful cycle of constantly trying to learn everything by focusing on building one small thing, learning from it, and moving to the next. She gets completely honest about the fear of sharing "half-baked," imperfect prototypes, how she revived a forgotten 12-year-old GitHub account, and the surprising moment a tech VP sent her a direct message on LinkedIn wanting to fork and reuse her repository.
We also walk through her brilliant, hands-on AI experiments, including:
The Local Personal Financial Analyst: Why she refused to upload her sensitive mortgage and bank statements to the cloud, and how she used Ollama with an open-weight model to build a private desktop assistant.
The School Memo Summarizer: A parent-teacher meeting notes compiler she built to simplify a massive school document, which was immediately validated by other working parents.
The Deal War Room: An enterprise-grade, multi-agent system simulating a 5-person deal pursuit team running mock proposals in parallel to produce partner-level final decks.
The Procurement Assistant: A local AI tool that analyzed public sector RFP responses and uncovered consistent, diplomatic evasion patterns in vendor answers.
Your next steps:
Do not wait for direction or permission from your current job; that opportunity may never come. Pick one annoying, recurring problem in your personal or work life, and build the roughest possible version to fix it. It does not even have to be code: it could be a simple prompt or a checklist. Spend a couple of weeks playing with it, and then show it to someone or share it publicly. Retrain your brain to trust your own execution and watch your confidence grow naturally.
Capture your proof of work: If you want help actually documenting what you are shipping, grab my free Get Recognized at Work: 5 Steps to Document and Show Your Impact playbook. It walks you through a simple weekly “Recognition Retro” so you can turn experiments like this into clear impact statements you can use in 1:1s, performance reviews, and promotion packets.
Connect with Tanushree:
Substack: Stay Ahead of the Curve
LinkedIn: Tanushree Panigrahy
Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Women Who Ship on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you never miss an episode of our journey!
Recommended Reading:
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon (sharing your process over polished output)
Let's go ship some good stuff together.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this episode are those of the host and guest alone and do not reflect the views of their respective employers.
Theme Music: The Success by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
