Amaar Chughtai. Engineer and founder in San Jose. Building null0 and Cotton. Neural decoding research at Princeton.
Most of my day goes to watching an agent click around a Mac and fixing what it gets wrong.
Work
- 2025–now An agent that operates a Mac from plain language. In public beta.
null0
Founder - 2025–now An iOS wardrobe that tags your clothes from a photo and picks outfits for the weather.
Cotton
Founder - 2025–now Reconstructing what a person saw from fMRI, building on MindEye. Top-5 retrieval up 28% over a ridge baseline.
Neural decoding
Research analyst, Princeton - 2023–25 Free courses that reached 25,000 students by 2025, and Nova, a tutor model we trained ourselves. Nonprofit, sponsored by Hack Club.
Stellar
Founder - 2024–25 Shopping search that tracks prices and where they are heading.
Pivyr
Founder - 2023–25 Swerve drive and flywheel control for an FRC World Championship qualifier.
WarriorBorgs 3256
Senior developer - 2021–23 A student app for Valley Christian. Led a team of 35 to 1,400 peak users.
VC Assist
Lead engineer
After hours
- Seven years, mostly jazz, performing around the Bay Area.
Piano
- Astrophotography of the moon, the planets and deep-sky objects.
Astronomy
- Math tutoring, pre-algebra through calculus. Founded the Software Development Club at Valley Christian.
Teaching
- An open forum I host on technology and culture.
At the Intersection
Recognition
- TEDx speaker TEDx
- President’s Award for Educational Excellence U.S. Department of Education
- USACO Silver USA Computing Olympiad
- Certificate of Merit, Level 10 Music Teachers’ Association of California
- Undefeated season, Public Forum debate Coast Forensic League