Another week with love for solving problems as a developers, just the leverage has changed. Instead of hand coding, we hand it off to an agent and focus on the broader problem. That might be not sustainable as I have said before. But if the problem is big, then it becomes just like the coding challenge, you don’t want to get bugged down by small pesky bugs on code rather think on the bigger problem.

Continuing the momentum into the next week.

Quote of the Week

“The ocean comes to the shore every minute, yet it gets pulled back. But it never gives up nonetheless, it unknowingly creates the rhythm of the ocean”

— Not quoted by anyone, just saw it somewhere similar to this quote

Its so deep yet simple. Ocean keeps washing its water over the shore, and has to recede it back, like someone trying to get something yet getting rejected or failing. But it doesn’t stop it, it keeps on trying day in and day out. Probably til the earth is there, and there is water in the oceans. This is what we refer to the rhythm of the ocean right? So beautiful that for many people including me, its a therapy to see and listen the ocean at the shore.

Life is like that, out of small grit, you develop a habit, and that habit becomes your character and the personality with which you develop a identity and stay in memories of people. Just keep doing what you love, consistently, no pressure, some day you’ll too be called a rhythm of ocean.

Read

1. Pydantic Blog: The human in the loop is tired

   1. Take my money for writing this post!

      “everything I write goes into some AI black hole. There's no person on the other side actually learning anything”

   2. So real. The part of interacting with an agent is just in-humane. It doesn’t give any skill boost. It makes us feel detached from the world.

   3. It feels good that an organisation which is probably at the forefront on the AI revolution, Pydantic is writing such human heart touching posts. Makes them valuable then ever.

2. Doug Turnbull Blog: Why write code in 2026

   1. In the era where people defend with “I read the code”, this blog post slows down and answers a deeper question. Why write when nobody is even reading the code.

   2. Writing code has and will continue to give me clarity along the way. But AI has made all of that clarity to be required upfront which is a bit taxing on the brain.

   3. Like imagine starting to work on.a feature, you start with the boilerplate code and then start to write something, then you realize oh, that is not right, we need this too, we won’t require that I think. And you get the idea, the clarity comes on the way and not staring at the agent after leaving it with a one line description of the task.

3. Hugo Daniel Blog: The end of creativity

   1. So true. Everyone will now want to use AI to be lazy.

   2. Creativity is something that you don’t get from letting someone else do it, its making mistakes and breaking things. But AI has made it even harder to explore creativity in some sense. It has expanded the imagination and what we can do with the kindle of a thought but beyond that, there is no bridging of that gap of fear to action.

4. George Hotz Blog: I love LLMs, I hate the hype

   1. This is cool. Some big people are stepping up and raising the alarm on the hype noise.

   2. This is a great thought in here “You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue, and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop”

   3. Perfectly put. Developers still need to hold the leash for what gets shipped.

Watched

• GPT Models in Claude code are better than in codex?

  • This is wild. The reason was hidden the codex system prompt is too good. I mean bad. It sounds cheesy, hard coded times, frontend design is a mess. Ouch! that hurted.

  • I had used codex extensively in the month of March to May, but then it was all limited and monthly quota got exhausted in a single prompt or I think they changed some things on free tier, not sure. But haven’t used it much since then.

  • I regularly use Claude code and Cursor with opencode in the mix if I need something quick and dirty scripts to get out of my way.

• GKCS: 20 Concepts to know in AI Engineering

  • No bullshit guide on the concepts. Straight to the point and precise. It is a great video to kindle the spark that there are a lot of things to explore and do even though AI can write code. Writing code is just one part of it.

  • I liked the explanation of top p and top k and temperature. That separation of idealogy makes it so much valuable.

  • The explanation of reinforcement learning, self supervised learning were all great to understand and know at least.

• GKCS: Current State of AI Engineering

  • This is really eye-opening. Engineers are not going anywhere. But surely we need to adopt. Design principles still remain vital.

  • Interviewing is a skill that is now taking out from the code to the high level design and the details too. This is perfect. I don’t like LeetCode solving but like talking about specific design decisions I made while making projects or working in a job. That feels human.

• Grant Sanderson on Dwarkesh Patel Podcast

  • Just math curious. Like the who rather than what was a interesting one.

  • I like his approach on learning and teaching. It also gives me hope, that humans will do math just because they want to. Its such a silly thought but a lot is said in that.

• Standup Math by Matt Parker: Has AI discoverd a new maths, vibe mathing?

  • OK, AI can write math proofs now. So what, we will have more math to do! Amazing right? right? Maybe yes, let’s see.

• Average Primeagen video be like reaction by Primeagen

  • This was really funny. Straight and vertical lines are no joke to do, and on live stream, its a next level.

  • Just a great video to watch amidst all doom and gloom of AI.

Learnt

• Writing working software is no more the goal or never was

  • I was working on a feature that adds a agentic block on a workflow.

  • Yeah! That sounds insane right? Adding llms as a brain as a block in a workflow. Kid you not, its the only solution when you can’t find relevance with a single llm call. You need to bring the pieces together and let the llm think and act.

  • For this to work, you don’t need working software, you need a clear generic goal. And defining that is no trivial. I am still in the hunt for that.

Tech News

• Kimi K3 is the best Frontend model: Not just open weight, but out pacing leading frontier closed source models too. Moonshot RELEASE BLOG

• X AI open sources Grok Build

• Thinking Machines.ai releases Inkling open-weight model

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#801st edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the 103rd Edition of techstructive weekly. I hope you found it helpful, and relaxing. If not please drop any suggestions, feedback or discussion about certain things you want to in the comments or drop me a message on my socials.

Thank you for reading,

Until next week.

Happy Coding :)

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I am on a roll here. I have been close to customers and solving some really intricate problems, not deep into code, but deep into understanding the user flow and what kind of specific things they might want to see. Documents are really the back bone of some people’s life and being able to reduce that review time is really a satisfying problem to solve. I need to sink that thing that I just said there. Its hard to compact it further I think. But I have been loving the process of it, not that its a great solution, but being able to come so close that users gets frustrated on how can the system miss it. Its like the last mile changes right. Being in tech teaches you grit and the curiosity is the one that fires to push you through the tough ones.

Anyways. I will be back this weekend for livestreaming. Last week was a bit of rain havoc. Will have some good voice maybe.

This week was a bit of drastic week. I lose one of my mentors at work. He’s still there, but eventually we’ll have to part ways. Its bit hard to digest that. My first mentor in work life, I couldn’t have asked for a better one. Some journeys end, some new begin.

Quote of the Week

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save, they just stand their shining“
— Anne Lammot in Bird by Bird

I read Bird by bird over the last weeks and wow. I have been blown away with that book. Bird by bird. The book is like that lighthouse for me. It just is there to provide a road to walk on. Like the manager that I had. Feels really sad to say that now.

No words here. You just get it or don’t.

Read

1. Programmers need to meditate

   1. Context switching is so draining. Yes this is a good advice. Honest and really needed for a developer like me.

   2. Its quite hard to review things now. Code can be generated at a whim.

2. Learn to code is still worth whole

   1. What a beautiful post. The harry potter reference just won my heart. Leviosa and harry you are a wizard, what a beautiful observation.

   2. Programming is like that, you first complain about the nitty-grities then realize, oh go to hell, you are a programmer man! You can create however you want. Building the intuition basically and understanding beyond the code just for fun.

   3. Fun is the part that makes any programmer addicted to it.

Watched

• The Primeagen on “I read the code”

  • This is solid stuff. I read the code. Its feeling like a ancient thing that used to be a myth. Reading code is ok, not like hard and fast rule to necessarily to be a developer. But when you want to prove a thing, and you have read the code, you have some confidence that no other metric or number can give you.

  • Vibe coding is fine, you don’t have to read the code always especially when performance or quality is not important, if getting the work done is important, which I agree are many things in the world, there vibe coding and blind developing a product or a software is fine. But not always.

• Computerphile: Why are tokens expensive

  • This was a eye opening and a great explanation of how you are billed for each message. Highly recommend people to check and understand to open a new chat if you have been cramping on the same chat for ages.

  • Not only that becomes less expensive but makes the model a bit more clear on the things, otherwise its like finding a needle in a sand. Context bloat is a thing and so is the model’s ability to understand so many things at once.

  • Lesson from this, start a new chat if llm is starting to deteriorate and hallucinating. Maybe even before that. I know its tempting to keep the conversation going, the model knows. a lot of things, you feel a resistance to open a new chat and provide all the details again. but that might help you solve the problem more effectively with a fresh perspective otherwise the model will create a mess of the code.

• Theo T3: The Grok Model is Good?

  • This looks absurdly a good model, somehow. Maybe its all cursor magic. But these two companies are really cooking up now.

  • I regularly use Grok for general search and summarisation things, its really good at that, and its quick too.

Learnt

• Small local models are great for some silly automation
  https://github.com/openbmb/minicpm

• Developers are still relevant, in fact they are more valuable because the ones who can care and go one mile ahead after vibe coding are the ones that deliver value.

Tech News

• X AI releases Grok 4.5: Phew the benchmarks look scary. This is genuinely a good model that doesn’t generate more tokens yet being equally smart. That is a big thing. Cost might be something that labs like Cursor and X AI have just flipped the game maybe.

• Chat GPT releases Work and GPT 5.6

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#801th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the 102nd Edition of techstructive weekly. I hope you found it helpful, and relaxing. If not please drop any suggestions, feedback or discussion about certain things you want to in the comments or drop me a message on my socials.

Thank you for reading,

Until next week.

Happy Coding :)

I will be quick this week. I had barely anytime to read or watch content. I was back in code. Deep not careless as people are pretending to be. I am not writing loops or vibe coding into production. I am using chat mode in Cursor to spawning parallel agents to solve issues that I find it cumbersome for me to tackle. I don’t skim through the suggested code, I read line by line, understand the flow. Write some code myself, to understand what is actually happening and to make myself realize the complexity.

I feel alive again as a software developer. I think this is life, some weeks make you feel down, some week make you excited to get up and smash hands on the keyboards. This week has been the later and I can’t be grateful enough.

It’s likely I would carry this momentum forward in the week. Do a livestream to explore some specific thing to keep the kindling flicker of curiosity alive and afloat myself in the dreaded hype of AI. I will read some and write some essays or novels to freshen my mind. Last week I wrote a 3k word essay and I feel great. It was from my memories, it felt great to move it off my chest. I would do the same this week too. Saturday for streaming and Sunday for writing my heart out.

Quote of the Week

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles before I go to sleep.”

— Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

This is something I read from the daily quotes. And it just made me smile. Just beautiful right. The path is dark and deep, but I have to walk anyway. That is how it is. The path appears gloomy and dark, but we often and most often come as a better person when we go through it. That is the way nature operates. You have to change in order to be happy, that is a state, to transition into that, you need to shed yourself from the current state. Change is the only constant. We’ll walk it through anyways.

Created

• HTTP Server in Golang from (almost scratch)

  • As I said last week, I wanted to build a http server in golang from scratch and I did it.

  • It was not from scratch but it was doing deep from the high-level. I enjoyed it. It was refreshing and I was able to understand the http request-response parsing. The next step is to understand the socket file descriptor inner working I think.

Read

1. Manu Martínez-Almeida Blog: Building Go-Gin: Simple over Easy

   1. Ok this is really good adivce. Building things which are simple over easy. There is a subtle difference between simple and easy. Something is simple to understand like http semantics, working with apis on postman feels easy, and python is easy to learn, but golang is a simple language to understand. There is a difference, yet very fine line is blurred for most of us.

   2. When I say easy, I mean the effort required to do something. Python looks easy on the outside, but when dealing with intricate dict mutation and internals, the easiness is no longer the ground. Its no longer simple, it was never simple, it made it look easy. Not saying Python is a bad language, but its not something you want if you are looking for lower abstraction.

   3. When I say simple, it means its requires very little or almost no cognition or effort to understand something or do it. When I look at a Golang codebase, it is not easy to understand it, there is a lot of code, but its simple. There is a difference. The size of things matter yes, but when everything is dead simple, it sometimes or most often is verbose. More verbosity doesn’t necessarily mean simple. Java is another example when I hear the word verbose. But what I am saying it simple is intuitive. Easy is a effort thing.

2. Carson Gross Blog: University in the AI Era

   1. This is very grounded and honest take on AI. I have hardly seen a professor express and address the concerns about AI. Really appreciated effort.

   2. This statement that University are in a great position to distance from AI with the physical interaction making it harder to AI access is good, but not sure till when that might hold true. If robotics sees a boom like text based LLMs we are not months away from creating a mess.

   3. The increasing of ambitious homework is the right and exciting move. I want to see myself how would I put effort to get to the goal. Its right that professors accept students will use AI and they intentionally increase the level of things they can produce.

   4. Homework is no longer a signal that builds on the above point. I like that, because I could see myself skimming over the homework to do something more interesting maybe? As I always have been to do programming.

   5. Visualizations are cheap. This is a underrated feature of AI, people are not trained enough to produce good quality visualizations. Maybe its moving too fast but there should be some ground where people are trained to create these helpful visualizations of things they want to learn to form a deeper understanding of a concept.

   6. I just love the take that hand coding is still a valiant thing and thought-after thing. Yes, it looks obsolete right now. AI agents can produce 40K lines of code in a day or more. But the human behind it needs to understand the value of those lines before judging the quality of it. Coding and programming are still valuable and not obsolete. Just that you need some edge in other domain to get the most leverage out of it. Now just knowing how to invert a bnary tree is not helping anyone, people need to understand the problem, the domain in order to apply and solve problems first.

3. The daily brief by Zerodha: A deep dive into the textile industry

   1. What a great read. It shows what the textile industry is, what the past, the current and the future looks like.

   2. The part that india is behind in the most profitable chunk of the process is so hurting. Also its a bit concerning that we are stagnant just because nobody wants to get out of the comfort zone. Its a huge risk, I understand, it might put end or stake someones livelihood out of the normal. But does that stability stall the progress of the nation? Its a bit debatable but India has surely gotten a bit stalled on this I think.

   3. The question of finding the next billion jobs is a bigger one. Its not easy to answer that, and predict what could come next. Does AI affect this in any way, does it make it worse or better. I don’t see any way it would make it better.

4. SpyGlass : Natural Born Bloggers

   1. A heartfelt blog in the memory of Om Malik. I am not aware of this person, but whoever it is, he is immortal due to his writing (at least for sometime for someone). I think writing is a great act you can do.

   2. I like that kind of personality. being able to communicate and make relatable analogies for people as a communication process.

   3. I cannot relate but deeply fathom that it would be hard to hear and discuss opinions of someone who you considered valuable.

5. Dan Kinksy: HackerRank opensourced their ATS, the results are quite inconsistent

   1. This is hilarious. Why would a company like hackerrank make such a software. I think it was vibe coded? Maybe. who knows.

   2. But building AI-systems is not just prompt, its more about the layers above and below it. It needs to deterministic, otherwise its not called a software. ATS is a software, and making it random would break the point of the software, either call it ATS or just call it a slot machine.

6. Dan’s Webnotes: CSS Tricks for markdown blogs

   1. This is so neat and useful. I want to build these things on my blog too. The blog itself is so aesthetically pleasing. I like minimal style.

7. Igor Kulman’s blog: I do not feel like a programmer anymore

   1. People are actually more brave then I thought. This is true. A very honest, open hearted blog.

   2. Tuning prompts and reviewing code is not the same as solving a deeper problem and sitting on it enough to get the bulb glowing. The moments of costly dopamine (opposite of cheap dopamine?) is getting harder to get in coding. Writing prompts, seeing AI solve problems, and guessing the outcomes doesn’t give any motivating feelings that would move us forward.

   3. This all cycle is so messed up in the software world. People are re-inventing how we develop software. I don’t know what is going to happen, but sooner or later, the gold old days should come back that’s my wish. Otherwise I don’t like it very much, I don’t hate it always but its a bit hard-pilled medicine to digest.

Watched

• Mario Zecher on Pi: I hated every coding agent, So I built my own

  • This is a nice little opinion, and he built a non-opinionated ai agent. he didn’t like the way other harnesses modified and obscured the context. He built one that does what it shows. Simple.

  • I haven’t used PI to be honest, because I don’t have a paid api key to work with. Thinking of using it with a local small open llm model.

• Corey Schafer: Python AsyncIO, a complete guide to asynchronous programming with visualisations

  • Just beautiful. Amazing stuff. i didn’t knew asynchronous means to pause and do other stuff while we wait for IO. I thought it was executing things in parallel.

  • Now I get the things, Its still requires me to build projects to fully understand it, but the idea is clear now. Its not magic anymore. The visualisations were really well made and made everything feel understandable instantly.

  • I think I am going to take some time to digest this. Run loop, the tasks, the threads and the groups all need to be understood in a slow way. the person making this video made a great effort in showing what async is in python. But on the other end, I also need to put in effort to understand it deeply.

Learnt

• PostgreSQL: you cannot use the aggregate function column with the having clause

  • SQLite allows it. PostgreSQL doesn’t. Wired.

  • basically you cannot say select sum(price) as total from transactions group by order having total > 50

  • You need to use the aggregate function again like so select sum(price) as total from transactions group by order having sum(price) > 50

• Kubectl on GCP

  • kubectl get pods gives the actual running instances (change on restart).

  • kubectl get deploy gives us the template + replica count that owns those pods

Tech News

• Fable is now allowed by US government

• Anthropic releases Sonnet 5

• Google releases Nano Banana Lite

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#800th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the 100th Edition of techstructive weekly. I hope you found it helpful, and relaxing. If not please drop any suggestions, feedback or discussion about certain things you want to in the comments or drop me a message on my socials.

Thank you for reading,

Until next week.

Happy Coding :)

Well! This feels unreal. 100 weeks have pased since I started writing this newsletter. I am still writing them. Unbroken saturday streak. Feels like time travel.

2 years is a lot of time. I don’t know what revolution we are witnessing after 2024, but since I started this newsletter, tech space has just fundamentally changed due to LLMs first, then AI-Agents and now Agentic Engineering. What comes next is what I am trying to figure out, how to work with them and how to be a better developer. That is why this was newsletter was created and it continues to do so.

I get a chance to feel myself in the loop by reading about people’s thoughts, their expereinces. But the best part is reflection. The amount of things I am able to retain and learn again from these posts are so much valuable. I am not just consuming the artilces or videos I reflect on what it gave me to think for, which direction I was wandering and where it left me. These questions are not something people or I can keep in my head while working in tech. its too overwhelming to do so. So every end of week, I try to dump out my thoughts in order to start again and align in a better direction to be a better developer or a human atleast.

So this another week in that, and I continue on this journey to explore and just tinker with stuff just becuase there was a curiosity to do so.

Quote of the Week

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird”

— Anne Lammott in Bird By Bird: Some instructions on writing and life

Bird by bird, one day at a time, next move best move (Sagar from Chess base india for the prop). You don’t have to live your life in a day, you don’t have to write the book in a day. You have to do one word after other, one paragraph other, one page , one chapter after other. That is how it goes. That is how our mind can keep up otherwise it will throw you off in random directions. Speed is not important, direction is, once you get direction, the speed is something comes naturally.

Just like this newsletter, one week at a time. It grew to 100 editions. Over two years. One article, one youtube video watched, one question, one bit of discovery led to 100s and thousands of links being explored. I created this web of link blog and I cannot thank myself enough for keeping up with the overwhelming amount of tech revolution. I kept on hanging, it was overwhelming but I still remember the joy of fixing a bug on my own on a computer windows 7 being in college 11th standard. It gives me the joy of solving problems and exploring. That will never leave me, one search at a time, one thing at a time. Don’t stress yourself, you are capable of doing anything just take the right amount of task at a time. Token by token like large lang… Damm that anaolgy.

Created

• HTTP Query Method

  • I wrote this blog to make myself clear on what the Query method is actually solving. And it was right. It serves as a bridging gap for limitation of GET request query parameters for filtering/searching/querying data and the unintuitiveness of using POST method for querying or searching data.

  • I wrote the problem first, and then built the intuition on why the HTTP Query method was proposed. It rightfully makes sense to have a separate method verb for obtaining or filtering data.

• Live Stream: HTTP Query Method in Golang

  • I also did what I said last week on this newsletter to start streaming again. And I loved it. It was annoying with the laptop crashing on saturday, but then I limited myself to few resources while streaming and it worked perfectly. I completed a basic implementation of query method using the net/http standard library for basic filtering. It was hardcoded to filter certain values only, but that is not the problem statement of this. The idea of this stream was to understand how QUERY method plays the role differently from GET and POST and how headers from OPTIONS help in linking the requirements to the final query.

  • Looking forward to doing a couple of more streams on writing http server from scratch in Golang this weekend.

Read

1. Jim’s Blog: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

   1. It might sound obvious at that moment for someone else, but for me if its quite complex to put thought into something then I write about it.

   2. Just like I wrote the Query method this week. It might be obvious that the query method does querying of data right? But why a separate method when we have GET? Think for a moment and you will find it intriguing to write about it once you figure that out in words.

   3. I might find this article like what am I talking about? That’s quite obvious now, it makes so little sense to write it, but to get it out of my brain help me crystalize what it was about. Writing blog is about connecting ideas, bringing them together and figuring them out as we learn.

2. Mark Round’s Blog: Its only when you look back after 25 years on a blog

   1. Wow! He has written everything he grew up in. I really the time, when sharing things was novel. But now, people look at it with a suspicion, is it ai slop? The value for writing honestly is more than ever.

   2. Writing is easier to produce but human sentiment is not. Human level understanding and intuition is a bit on a stretch. We need humans to make humans understand things. Maybe it might not be the case in few years, who knows.

   3. But this blog deserves praise. 25 years of consistent blogging whilst keeping up with his hobbies and job is not something everyone is able to do. And having the courage to say see you in 25 years is commendable.

   4. The change looks really bizare, like in 90s there were rams of hardly kbs. Now we struggle even having 10s of GBs of ram. Phew! Nothing is never enough. The blog running on PHP and what not was really relatable. I started my blog with jekyll on github pages, moved to python markata still on github pages and now its on custom go ssg on github pages with other apis and projects on cloudflare and vercel.

   5. I have written articles over 5 years now. I dont want to stop. I am writting again, after a year of blocking by hands due to AI hype and existential dread, but I have hopes now. I just care for myself and 1 human atleast who would find my writing joyful, maybe its a ai agent at some time, I don’t care even if nobody reads my blogs, I will have a repertoire of content as a archive of my growth just to myself.

3. Akash Tandon Blog: Debugging in the age of ai agents

   1. This is a bit hard and situational. Hallucination is a very thin line between the truth and the evidence. if you have designed the system to produce some context that might delude the agent into something misleading, it will hallucinate. This is not a ai problem but a human engineering problem.

   2. The other problem is genuine which it gives a confident wrong analysis. Its almost like a fantasy story it came up with, the moment we say “are you sure”, the story disappears and the agent wakes up to crash and produce more false evidences.

   3. Having a general understanding and the direction in a bug is so underated. If you can identify the problem, narrow it down to a certain scope or module, then the chances of Agent going haywire reduce, not saying it goes to 0, but you can manually then hop in and see for yourself. Programming is outsourced to AI agents, debugging still cannot be.

4. The Guardian: Indian Factory workers told to film themselves while working

   1. This is rough! I though only software development process was easily solvable with AI since we exactly know what we want (actually we dont at all, but we pretend we do). Software is testable, we can check if its right or wrong. But for manual work, its possible too but quite hard to verify it.

   2. That is why labs are gathering data now. Text generation has now hit a ceilink. We can only do certain things for certain tasks with text models and tool calling. This is now getting understood and there is a need to get image and video footage of replicating the same with robots in mechanics.

   3. I don’t like it, but seems inevitable. The industrial revolution might be nothing compared to this. This might give people a serious existential dread.

5. Vinicius’ Blog: When I reject AI code even if it works

   1. Yes, exactly. When YOU write the code, you have the context, you have the details, you know why exactly there were 2 parameters and not one, why it was abstracted from the module, why the code was written the way it was. But when we offload that to an agent, it has the context. No matter how much you read the ask mode answer, you still have lost the connection to the code, you have connection but scattered or not fully formed.

   2. This is might not seem like a issue to have confidence in the code at first when merging, but when things start to break over time, as they do, it becomes harder and harder to reason through it. The compounding effect of your lose connection to the code and the pile of changes from the Agent which might be unwanted and trash. We software developers have to pay that cognition debt to resolve it, its a trade off people are thinking coding is solved. It might not be just yet. The compounding will take some time, some of them have already realised it, some are about to hit the storm.

   3. This paragpraph sums it so well

      Yes, coding agents can help you with this task with more than just writing code, but that doesn’t mean they can do it autonomously in a sustainable manner yet.

   4. They cannot just yet.

6. PostHog’s Blog: Robbie Coomber wrote a 70x faster SQL parser while barely looking at the code (agentic coding and not vibe coding)

   1. OK, hot takes.This is a great article. It proves that engineering is still a need to get most out of ai agents. It wouldn’t have been possible without the author knowing how the sql parser works in existing library ANTLR and a other approach to do it efficiently.

   2. Technically I dont know how each of the two approaches work, but from reading it meant two approaches are opposite ends, one is faster and only for specific set of general operations, the other is more careful and gives a general purpose full parser maybe. Both the approaches worked for him, but he choose the faster specific use case one. This shows how easy it is to generate a working code, but maintaining becomes a question. I case of parsing a SQL query, this looks simple and without any maintenance cost I think. But in general cases, AI generated code is not magic and will need some before or after thought.

7. Stephen Smith’s Blog: Linux kills strncpy

   1. Oh! That is nasty. I didn’t knew strncpy was that dangerous. Copying data from the stack was a gigachad move from hackers. being a hacker is so underrated, like it takes some thinking to break code, though the direction is wrong so its not worth it.

   2. But the other point is that it took 5-6 years to remove this from the kernel. This shows how hard it could get if some code remains in the system for a long time. This is legacy code, if we are vibe coding things, ai generated code will at some point become this, and the problem is not that it becomes hard to remove things, but the knowledge of where the code should be and should not be removed is also gone. Engineers might not know the code anymore, so it remains on the whim of AIs to generate and clean up things. Adding the complexity.

8. CSVBase Blog: Parquet is more than Turbo CSV

   1. This was so cool. Last week I. read about the duckdb and its engine. I was intrigued by the design of duckdb like parquet. And this week this answers that question. Seems like I am sync with the universe, its giving me hints.

   2. So, parquet is column based storage but also row based chunking. So streaming is not possible if you need intermediate data. Since its broken down into columns, its not possible to stream half of it, either you get full or nothing. The metadata thing is so cool. it has sorted the different types of data, encodings, null and even time stamps and zones (god has anyone said time? what time). having rich metadata is not a tradeoff its a design that makes parquet really great for large data storage.

   3. It reduces the size to almost 50% from csv that is just bonkers. Imagine what it would be from json to parquet that I did and felt for aircraft flight observatory project a couple of months back. Its quite evident, parquet is a great format for storage.

9. Pydantic takes a great initiative to take httpx maintenance with httpx2

   1. This is a genuinely a great gesture from Pydantic, this means they truly value human and open source. This shows the care for development of such libraries. In the world of darkness, there are people still lighting up candles to show the path to the lost.

   2. Really looking forward to this project, I want to see why is it so great. Honestly I haven’t used httpx, I have only used requests. Maybe I have touched a bit of it in contributing to posting here? I think its a good abstraction for working with http requests and responses, but why is it different from requests? is it opinionated?

10. Timon Web’s Blog: Wagtail as Django Admin on Steroids

    1. This is true. And it shows how a niche thing can become a business. This was executed brilliantly. No doubt.

    2. Wagtail is just a wrapper around django admin, that’s it , the UI and the configuration. Nothing is magical, yet people use it to save the time and money from doing it themselves. Perfectly valid and genuine use case for a business to thrive.

    3. I am thinking is there anything to build like that?

11. Plik Blog: Read more fiction

    1. I dont need this advice. I relate to this so much. I already read non-fiction all the time, emails, technical reading the thing I read for my blog here, etc. That’s why I want to escape into a world. Escapism, copium, whatever you can call it. It heals me, I don’t care if you call me weak.

    2. I read, I feel good. I feel I can live my life, I feel I am not alone. When I write, there is the page, the blank editor ready to hear me out.

Watched

• The Pragmatic Engineer Gergely’s Talk: Slow down and Speed up

  • ouch! Facebook sorry Meta had a bug in their AI chatbot? Was it that capable of sending useful data? Really? Was it intentional to get attention that their AI is somewhat capable? I didn’t knew this bug in instagram happened? Phew! Vibe coding is actually happening at the best engineering firm.

  • Token maxing was a thing yes, now people are facing the issue of cost for certainly. The AI bit is sitll a constant, its not going anywhere, its like a atium in the mistborn, everyone wants unlimited amount of tokens but nobody has the money to buy that. It will go down as another tool, I surely think, it wont be 100% developer replacing thing.

  • This video is a great showing just that, people will still be around figuring stuff out, so we need to slow down and brace for what is going on and about to happen.

• AI Loop Engineering take from Neetcode

  • We needed this desparately. A great great courage by Neetcode I forgot his name(I think Navdeep right?) . But the point being, cutting the hype. People are posting contradictory things as evident from the video. Nobody knows the correct and reproducible way to work with LLMs that is the thing people and the labs advocating are sugarcoating.

  • I know its a great tool, I like to use it, but there’s a limit in what people should talk about and not spread degeneracy and misleading hopes of being 100x and being left behind. That is atrocious and not something I like to live with.

  • Thanks Navdeep for this post. We genuinely need content like this from others too. That actually glaze over the hype and spit out facts.

• Sentdex: There has been a situation in AI

  • OK, People are waking up. This is true. People dont want to vendor locked in. This is like cloud lock. But a far more muffled and hideous.

  • This guy is a legend, and mostly has thought many python developers of today the basics of ML in python. An absolute legend of pre-LLM era. Open source models are getting seriously close, like there is a understandable gap, but people can build meaningful prototypes from it. And that is already halved the cost not less right?

  • I have no idea about GLM 5.2 but if its this guy saying it, then hands down it should be. Cannot test it, but will try to check with openrouter if available for free tier.

• Daniel Hirsch Streaming: Coding an HTTP Server in C

  • This was a great learning experience. I wanted to understand what a socket connection really does in a http server. So its basically a file descriptor just like pipe, socket, or terminal descriptior in unix. That is just like a file streaming. That makes sense. The interface is unified for accessing the network and the file.

  • I feel like building this in Golang. Maybe this weekend it will be a stream to build a http server from scratch in Golang. I want to see how we connect to sockets and listen and then accpet and then process the request and response to the client. It feels great to just be able to do things low level.

• Tsoding Streams: Let’s talk about AppImage

  • Ok, this was good stream. It showed how ridiculous documentation can get. People are trying to sell things, but when the buyer is already sold, the user want to know how to use it, and AppImage developers did a bad job making that process easy. It was obsfucated from making obvious to create an appimage than it was to run a app image.

  • Maybe AppImages are great but they still have shared dependencies from the os level so its not quite isolated right?

• Whom does ChatGPT serve? Jonathan Pageau talks

  • A great talk! I dont know the story but it felt relatable the urge to listen to someone and act blindly in instinct like animal instinct is increasing with the usage of AI.

  • We need to understand what we are doing and on what motivation are we doing it. The fundamental of action is being eroded by these AI text chunking machines.

  • Great points by the speaker here, we humans contradict ourselves when our mind is not aligned, like he gave examples of Elon Musk saying AI as existential risk to humans initially but then creating his own AI. WOW! What a full cricle here.

  • Must watch to get the sentiment of this topic, its a heavy topic to grasp and cannot be comprehended here.

Learnt

• HEAD Method is not used for getting supported or accepted request format in http

  • I thought for using QUERY, I need to first send OPTIONS to checks if QUERY method is supported and if so, then send HEAD to get the Accept-Query header to check which format is supported for requests and then send the QUERY method finally.

  • But that was not it, We can directly send the Query method. The options and head are for discoverability and not like required to send it obviously I was just showing the right fundamental way of exploring APIs with the new Query method.

• Django filters: chained filter vs multiple fields in a filter

  • This one was interesting. I learned that chaining .filter() calls and combining multiple conditions in one .filter() are equivalent in many cases, they both produce a bit of situational sql depending on the relation in the fields passed to it.

• How to build a http server from scratch in C

  • Instead of relying on a high-level HTTP library, I learned how an HTTP server starts with sockets, accepts TCP connections, reads raw bytes, parses the HTTP request manually, and sends back a correctly formatted HTTP response.

• How to parse numbers from strings in C

• Messaging apps scrub the exif data of images before sharing

Tech News

• Anthropic releases Claude Tag on Slack

  • Ok, didn’t they release this like bot earlier? I thought it was a joke but then Karapathy’s tweet was seen and I was like what? Then I realized this is a instance of claude code (kind of) in a slack channel. I am not sure about this.

  • The amount of wasteful content in a channel might pollute the context and make it do random things. So, not sure it would be the right thing all the time, but can see it being useful in isolated specfic conversations.

• Notion shuts down Notion Email after a year

  • I remember or not maybe, it was Notion who said, we know mail better then you, so we launched Notion mail. Was it notion or someone else I am not sure, but this is contradictory.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#799th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the 100th Edition of techstructive weekly. I hope you found it helpful, and relaxing. If not please drop any suggestions, feedback or discussion about certain things you want to in the comments or drop me a message on my socials.

Thank you for reading,

Until next week.

Happy Coding :)

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What a week. It was a great week not gonna lie. Finally seeing the light of the day after 1 month of grind. Being able to see the satisfaction of a user is a different ball game. Speed is something I couldn’t deal with, it becomes overwhelming to manage. But sometimes its good to push yourselves to get something. Maybe nobody will appreciate or notice at that time, but you will know what worked for you, how can you adapt next time and learn the lessons.

I am feeling the energy now to explore things and just keep doing things once I found exciting back in 2020-2023 era. Somehow I lost that overtime. Maybe I can blame AI, but I should blame here myself for getting carried away with the hype and living in the expectation that AI will eventually make developers obsolete. Or I can put it as there won’t be a need to learn anything or something specific deeply. I was wrong. You don’t learn to compete with AI, you learn to be confident in yourself, the moat is not what you know, its what can you do with that, what patterns you can find that LLM can’t comprehend. Maybe its time to get back into learning mode. Forgetting for a moment that LLM can do it for me.

I also read this article “Reading is not a competition”, it was a quick read, the author was to the point and added his own personal experiences which makes it authentic and worth reading. I relate to this. reading should be a personal activity and not a gamification of numbers. People spend time reading to get more books done, but that is not the point. The point is to enjoy them. I read a bunch of books, not sure how many but in May-June I read at least 3 I think, one of them was “Kafka on the Shore” that book just hits hard. It is so deep and magical at the same time. I will continue to read more books just for fun, I do have some number in reading challenge, but I don’t care If I complete it or not. It is just for me to keep reminding me to keep going through in life, keep up the reading habit. The habit itself heals me.

Quote of the Week

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Yeah! Happiness is just in dreams something abstract. But unhappiness quietly becomes a story. How relatable and rightly put. In the context of the story this was so hard hitting. It feels right to use that analogy. Happiness for me at least is not a story maybe, it becomes a journey, and unhappiness is the start of it, it eventually lands maybe but unhappiness is a complete story. Either you failed or you missed it, if you are lucky you get success, for the rest of us it remains a dream something that we can’t feel, almost distant.

Read

1. Grey Beam Blog: DuckDB Internals - Part 1

   1. A very balanced article. Not too shallow, nor too deep. It was the right thing for me to get through. I understood the parts involved in the query parsing and storing the database. There are a lot of things done by the storage engine too, just to make the rest of the query analysis and execution process easier and efficient.

   2. I didn’t knew parquet was a column based storage, I thought it was some sort of a compression format. It also stores zones which help in retrieval. DuckDB leverages the strengths of Parquet files on its own architecture and the result is SQLite like nativeness with speed and more features.

   3. I am keen on reading the other 2 articles in the series. As I have used duckdb on my airspace case study, I want to know how it was able to pull off the huge mamoth data but sqlite was slow.

2. AI Creativity and Discovery - Thoughts by Richard Sutton

   • A very calm and no fuss article / tweet. It was to the point and calming, nothing like “developers have lost their moat” and whatever glazing people do these days, it was like a peaceful write up.

   • It gave me a thought, a freeing thought if you will, “AIs are just mimic” It was said by him, I am not quoting him for it, but that is so freeing and a well put in words. People think this is AGI and all jobs are replaceable and what not. But if we want to create something novel and good, AI cannot do both which is right. It can write good code, also novel code sometimes, but not at the same time. It cannot write something that is out of the ordinary, it can produce customized software, basic ones, like applying one thing pattern to other. That is solved, its grunt work even for human I can say that. But beyond that, it cannot really do much. It cannot create the 10008 RFC Query method spec for humans to follow. Humans still need to be in the process, the steering drivers.

   • Just feeling good after reading this. I am very positive on AI as a tool. But sometimes, people just go too far with that idea and leave everything on auto-pilot and panic mode. Humans still needs to be in the weeds. This kind of write-up is a example that I keep on reading stuff. Every once in a while I get this kind of words to read that makes me feel alive and charged back.

3. Mark Nottingham Blog: You want to define well-known URI

   1. This is some great advice.

   2. Don't use it as a shortcut for a real URL, If your protocol can transmit a full URL, transmit the full URL.

4. Gitignore isn’t the only place to ignore files in git

   1. Wow! This was clever. I didn’t knew you could ignore a previously tracked file from the git without mentioning it in the gitignore.

   2. There are two more places you could do that, those look internal but gets the job done without leaking on the public

   3. .git/info/exclude: This is for the local git repo, you add the filename and it ignores the file. Pretty neat.

   4. ~/.config/git/ignore: This is for global context. If you say .DS_STORE or whatever mac has, it will not track in any git repo of your device.

5. RFC 10008: The HTTP Query Method

   1. This was proposed in 2019s, and got accepted in 2026, damm, we are still evolving HTTP. And some people claim “Software is solved(mostly)”.

   2. I like this approach of taking things time, protocols are something you can’t vibe code or generate a spec using plan mode. It needs discussions, sleeping on it, thinking through things, and a lot more thinking then the currrent LLMs context limits.

6. American Express Blog on Cell based Architecture for payment processing

   1. This feels one of those articles where its quite hard to understand the details. It like doing a high level design interview but just completed after the basic diagram, no edge case discussion no schema or examples.

   2. I am not saying this is not resourceful. Its a great piece of information, maybe not for my level of understanding. Maybe its too high level or just enough to give someone a hint about designing a broader system.

   3. I like some points though, which require some digesting

      “for mission-critical systems like payments, we find that the benefits of a reduced blast radius and improved resiliency outweigh the additional complexity”

   4. This is so true, the trade off is there and rightly so, the payment processing comes over in priority over the complexity.

7. Introducing the pkg.go dev API

   1. This is a good entry into the ecosystem. Go team knows there is a need to expose the packages in a ai-agent-friendly way. And this seems to be a right move.

   2. By exposing this over api, an ai agent can know what the package’s structure or core features are without needing to download it. its debatable how well it is documented. But if it is then its a powerful way to use it for agents.

   3. I would like to explore this with the open api specification. Right now that looks very bare bones.

8. Roman Imankulov Blog: A backdoor in a Linkedin Job offer

   1. Damm! GitHub borrowed identity. You can do that? Like what? You can take my username and stick to some other repos’ commit! Whew!

   2. But that was a clever way to check it. Readonly tools and PI agent. Wow! I haven’t tried PI maybe its time to combine the PI and the 3B model by cohere locally.

   3. Security is a nightmare these days, AI has made it easier to create software, but at a cost of introducing more bugs and loopholes and scripts like that. Reviewing software is not a bottleneck, its a mandatory thing to do and might be the only thing to do before breaking into the prod.

9. What job interviews thought me about Kubernetes

   1. This is the trend which looks a bit dangerous and safer too. If every one is on K8s then its fine, but if there are people on other things then it becomes like the pascal or fortran thing, very few developers know the way out.

   2. This is also partly due to AI maybe. People get same suggestions and they accept it without second thought. Maybe there might be a few years where software development has stalled. Like no new frameworks or ways of working with things, just rewiring existing technology or frameworks to make the things moving.

10. Marek Suppa’s BLog: Making HTTP requests from a container that has no curl, using bash /dev/tcp

    1. This is cool. Bash is some magical compiler that knows a little too much to be used right?

    2. It cannot read the request just parse it up so that it can send the request. It feels like everything was designed so perfectly right? Imagine an AI in this container, will it be able to get the request across?

Watched

• Theo Reacts: AI makes junior engineers less harmful

  • This is a hot take really. Its a hard pill to digest, a bitter lesson. Some people get bad with AI, they don’t learn more. I think I am falling into that territory. I need to up my game and actively learn new stuff. But again, this kind of is too much of a pace to keep up, what exactly to learn, what depth is enough, is just too much blurry these days. You can call it excuses but honestly for me its a battle to navigate this time.

  • Judgement and Escalation of work is something will be the key in the coming years maybe, but gathering experience and being in the deep tech will be helpful, no matter what the situation becomes.

• The Primeagen: I am done with Golang

  • Yep, the iterators just bugged me. I was not able to wrap the head around why was it needed, when there was just one way to loop, for for everything, simple.

  • I have used go for maybe more than 3 years now, I do still like it, but the features they are adding, its like making it bloated and a bit confusing and looking like a another generic programming language. Its not that bad, (C++ sigh! its way way better then that, maybe its out of reach of that) but I do hope that it remains as simple as it is now. Adding all swiss army knives might be breaking the appreciation and the bond that developers have over the language.

• The Twin Prime conjecture

  • This is so fascinating. It was impossible to it, but somehow it was done.

  • Everything seems impossible until its done. Another quote to take away is “not knowing somethings are better”. Because in some cases, you need your mind to wander in that uncertainty for it to find new pathways and push beyond the comfort zone.

  • I also learnt about the sieve of erotosthenes. It is quite simple right, but people just make it complicated. It is one of the examples, of how simple things can lead to broad understanding of unrelated things.

Non tech video but helpful for indian audience on mathematics

• Basic Mathematics: Episode 1 by Anand Kumar in Super Infinity

  • This is so underrated. Like I know this sounds too basic, but look at how enthusiastically he explains those simple concepts, look at the relation he draws from each concept to other. Its just a beautiful thing to watch.

  • Fundamentals are going to be the thing that makes or break the youth at any era, AI or not, you need to know some things regardless of how smart things are around you.

Learnt

• The query method in HTTP which was released in the RFC 10008 this month has been in discussion since 8 years.

  • This query method bridges the gap of complicated GET request for filtering by not using POST method.

  • Like if we have some query to filter in a get request, the query parameter can be used but there are limitations and it becomes a bit hard to decipher. Also some browsers or websites discard that piece of information that might be needed in the query.

  • And using POST method, is a bit conter-intuitive since you are not creating or modifying resources on the server, you are just filtering them right. People use POST just to get the request body.

  • QUERY method solves this, by adding a content type and based on that the request body is communicated to the server or the client. Really making the right balance in complex filtering options.

  • I am looking forward to building something with it over the weekend on a livestream.

Tech News

• Anthropic’s Flagship model “Fable” was banned by the US Government

  • This lasted barely a day and shut down. Just like the name fable is a short lived story, the model did what it was meant to. Might be a marketing stunt again from Anthropic to get attention.

• SpaceX to acquire Cursor

  • This was coming and it looks closer. I am not sure what to expect out of it. The composer models are quite fast I can say, a bit expensive yes, but the speed is just next tier of its own.

  • If they get right compute engine, they might have the best moat.

• Z.ai releases GLM 5.2:

  • According to artificial analysis it is the leading open weights model.

• Cohere releases their first ever developer model: North Mini Code

  • This is pretty neat, usable and open source. 3B is manageable I think on any low-end laptops too. Especially people like me with only 8GB of RAM.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#798th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this 100th newsletter its 99th edition starting from 0, so 100 newsletters written. That feels unreal. 2 years gone!

Looking forward to a learning weekend and slowing things down by reading and getting mental peace. Being a developer in 2026 is easy, but being a good and effective developer in 2026 is exhaustive and not a piece of cake.

With that thought, I’ll conclude here.

See you in the next one.

Happy Coding :)

Week #98

It was a high-low week. The Monday gave a tearful morning, somehow scampered on the evening with a good fresh mood. The next day was chaos, I was totally burnt out and the week continued to take the toll. Agent clanking in the background, understanding the problems, addressing them on the calls. It was a week where I didn’t get time to read. I read all 5-6 articles on a friday evening to be honest, which has almost never happened, I usually read something during a week, a afternoon break, or a morning chill 5 minute break.

That might be work, or you can say I was busy reading “Kafka on the shore” it was a riveting book, I am 90% of way through, its almost converging, I am barely able to contain myself in completing the last 60 pages, yet I want to write this first.

I felt accomplished this week, give or take how bad i started with. I had a conversation that made me think deeper on my trajectory and how far I have come. I have built so many things and have taken things that I did for granted. I need to keep doing them and not let AI take over me I suppose. Software has been valuable and interesting to me, I cannot let a token prediction thing take that away from me.

Quote of the week

“The journey I’m making is inside me. Just as blood travels down veins, what I’m seeing is inner self, and what seems threatening is just the echo if the fear in my heart”

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I marked this line instantly I read it. It was a quote I can keep me with. It feels so good to just read it. We are not competing with others, we are on a mission to do the things we want ourselves to be doing, its about self discovery and self fulfillment. Yes, there are things we do for others, but behind that there is a selfish motive to fulfill our desires and feel good. It is all about discovering and experiencing those desires and values that we truly want to be living in.

Created

• APIs: apis.meetgor.com

  • My own set of apis, my blog, newsletter, reading and writing list, link blog and more to come

  • I will also be adding standalone apis like games and llamaline, quiz, etc.

  • Its built on cloudflare workers. It was really nice and quick. Would be developing a full set of features and apps on top of it. It will be like a collection of personal software and interests all in one place, queryable and free.

Read

1. belderbos.dev: “Rust Is for People Who Want to Be Punished.” Now Jochen Trusts It More Than Python

   1. This intrigues me, like the world is so apart right now. People are on two ends of spectrum, one who have 30+ years of experience and saying, fundamentals and love for learning to code will never be replaced, on the other hand, there are AI-optimists, who says, ‘code is not the point, good software is’. I don’t where I want to be.

   2. I definitely started because of the curiosity and probably will continue because of it, but its too big of a divide to be choosing and I don’t feel like I am in a correct position, or I should say, I have positioned myself in a wired spot. Where code is not the point, the product, or the thing that I produce that will value the customer is. Code has 0 value. Hand coded or vibe coded, it doesn’t matter. I am feeling a bit existential because I haven’t been able to prove that wrong.

      “The error messages were my friends right out of the gate”

      • Yes, error messages are valuable, I want to collect as many as I can. But AI is eating them up before me. OR I am letting him eat up?

      “Rust is a beautiful language. It's an aesthetic language. It looks good, and working toward more beautiful code was really something I liked”

      • Really its good to view structured and understandable code, I am not gonna lie, it feels great to write some sophisticated code by hand (not to confuse someone but to make it usable). Though with AI reading and writing most of the code, who even bothers?

   3. I like the author’s honesty and raw expression but I am not in a right mindset to agree to this I think, we are past the point where programming languages matter in making code look readable.

2. Sean Goedecke’s blog: Doing nothing at work

   1. This is a good post, there are stressful times in a year mostly two or three, but month after month is not sustainable right?

   2. I thought working at a startup might be good for learning, but its turning out to be a double edged sword of stress and no time to breathe. Its too much of cognition overload, with AI its becoming a nightmare to get up daily and grind 12 hours.

   3. But the points here are laid out really well. You need to be unoccupied in order to do a high impact task, and also doing the right thing at the right time, that only happens if your mind is clear.

3. API Evangelist: Replacing the Petstore OpenAPI with the Train Travel OpenAPI Specs: https://bump.sh/blog/modern-openapi-petstore-replacement

   1. This is a fresh take on use dummy api examples vs serious examples correctly.

   2. I like good examples, it helps go beyond the basics and enforce certain good practices is a bonus.Going beyond CRUD is what makes this likable and relatable.

   3. It is common enough and specific enough to make the reader and the learner distinguish his / her perspective and take away all the good lessons.

4. Zed Blog: Software is made between commits

   1. Really interesting. I agree that the meat of the decisions happen before even a commit is made, the commit might be a lossy compression of the decisions and features scopes.

   2. With delta db it looks something different, I am not sure what the flow would be, but having all the context and history of what happened to the code as it got transformed from one stage to other is really correct analogy. Especially after agentic engineering is taking off.

   3. I haven’t tried Zed, maybe this month might be a good one to do so, who knows there’s a world beyond vim?

5. AI as Normal Tech: Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers and won’t

   1. The sandwich of decide-execution-deliver is really a good analogy. I also agree to the two opposite ends are not replacable by AI at all, that is a human part, that is something humans have to do.

   2. Execution is largely solved is like saying “Coding is mostly solved” that might not be entirely true but yes, generating a code is solved, what and why that question is not.

   3. A really good hopeful post in a age of slop and fear.

Watched

• What’s new in OpenAPI 3.2 by Lorna Mitchel Jane

  • This was a nice overview on what was released in the 3.2 version of the OpenAPI specification. The addition of tag kinds and parent hierarchy is really nice to have, enhancing the documentation readability and navigation. The query string schema is also cool, it makes it like a lego block to play with. Fits in really nicely with the existing spec. The discriminator default mapping fits perfectly for many usecases.

  • It again makes me feel that life is lived by finding happiness in the smallest of joys in just self interest and caring about things.

• It finally happened, DHH’s take is wrong maybe

  • Well, open source is kind of in a place of bother due to AI. People are AI washing the repositories like spam PR bots. Its rough years to be a open source maintainer.

  • I like prime’s take here, he is rightfully comparing the Zig’s vision. The learning aspect is what makes opensource the existing reason. People are attracted to it, just because of curiosity and the willingness to explore something on their own accord, and AI doesn’t help here, yes it can help you get unblock but crawling with it is not helping you to learn to walk or run.

• The Primeagen takes on “Coding is solved”: I think they are lying to you

  • This is a solid dig at Boris. Coding largely solved in 2025, 2026, the flickering is 85% fixed. Wow! I am joyed to be alive and reading this. Claude is good, it can write code more than me and 100% better than me, but …. I don’t want 100% more code right? i am happy in just 10% but the one that makes me happy and live better.

• What makes Code Cozy, TJ and Vegan on the Cozy code hour podcast

  • Cozy code is a really subjective one, and to be honest in the age of AI this is the least bothering thing, because nobody is reviewing it anymore is it? ; |

  • A good chilly video if you want to listen to it.

Learnt

• Understanding requirements and what to build is still a bottleneck, though the execution might have become a cake walk

  • Thanks to AI Agents, navigating a complex task is easier, not cake walk all way through, only a part of it is automated, the decisioning and taking the right judgement is still a human taste.

  • I was working with the clankers and throughout the week, it had asked me only 10 or so questions, but those questions were like really draining my mental bandwidth, like stretching my thinking to a bit, those would have taken days or not weeks to come up with if I would have evaluated and written the code. But thanks to these AI Agents I can make them in a few hours of work and jotting it down in a english paragraph.

• I moved the dns server from hostinger to cloudflare

  • It was a brave move, but I made it, I thought I might bring some web pages down, but nothing bad happened.

  • It is like moving your nameservers delegates the authoritative control of the domain’s DNS zone file from Hostinger’s local servers to Cloudflare’s global Anycast network, allowing Cloudflare to route, secure, and proxy all incoming web traffic before it reaches your hosting origin. That was a good thing to learn.

Tech News

• Anthropic releases Fable 5 (Nerfed Mythos)

  • This looks big, as people have reported. I am not sure if it will be a willing model to do more things willingly. The will thing as well is becoming blur.

• OpenCV 5 Released

  • Feels good that the core libraries are still being pushed and getting released, powering the next generation of software must be solid and robust for software to make leaps.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#797th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this one, a bit short, a bit dense, but consistency is the key if you notice the 98 in the edition, almost 2 years in the completion. No pauses, no breaks, just week in and week out.

See you next week for the 99 special edition.

Take care, Thanks for reading..

Happy Coding :)

It was a great week. A hope kindled out of random or maybe out of pity. I appreciate it with both hands, and don’t want to throw it away. Maybe I was unlucky for the past couple of months, but when it strikes, I have to be ready with both hands, when a opportunity comes, the preparation is what makes your luck work.

I will be on a roll on the weekend for exploring APIs and deeply understanding OpenAPI specifications, I know the fundamentals, have developed and maintained a few over the last couple of years, but need to make it to the next level. I think I have been ignorant of my interests and curiosities, not sure why I let the time get wasted. But anyhew, we need to move on, this week has surely inspired and bought back the spark that I have been missing since maybe a dozens of weeks. AI is over, I know what it can do and cannot. Enough of the hype, its time to get the steering wheels back.

Quote of the Week

“In dreams begin responsibility”

— William Butler Yeats

mentioned in “Kafka on the Shore” By haruki murakami

I was reading this book “Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami, and this paragraph just sticks out. There are so many quotes from this book, so many thoughts I want to pen and paper to, but taking one bit at a time. This one is deep. Dreams do bring responsibilities, flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Wow!

Isn’t it fascinating. I mulling over this quote which was mulled over by Haruki Murakami, through the lens of Kafka. Its just like a thread of thought is shared between the author and the people he is thinking of and me the reader. Just cannot put word to it, but its powerful thing to be able to do that. Reading does wonders to the mundane life, inspires and unclogs the brain from negative thoughts.

Read

1. Caio Bianchi: A love Letter to Neovim

   • I can feel the words here. It could be AI but I not 100% sure of that. It looks authentic in some angles, though some analogies do remind me of those sloppy comparisons.

   • But the gratitude and empathy for the editor is what I like about the article. It just appreciates how available and freeing is to use Neovim.

   • It just works. It doesn’t break with some updates (unless you run packer sync amidst mid-meeting). You are confident that it will work anytime you do certain things, type certain things exact same results. It feels smooth and doesn’t take eternity to load and boot up. I love it too.

2. Sean Goedecke: Wired Projects I shipped with AI

   1. Man that is so cool. He literally came up with Endless Wiki (which was copied by xAI as Grokipidia, sad life). So he is AI maximalist. But in a good way I think.

   2. He knows stuff, what would work and what won’t right.

   3. He also clears the confusion that I constantly ask myself , “if LLMs are so good at writing code, where is the tsunami of new AI-generated apps, services and games?” he responds by saying “Writing code is only one of the bottlenecks involved in actually shipping a new product, after all”. There are other bottlenecks like decision making and the most bugging question for developers. “Why to build it”, what is a imagination and creativity problem and how , llms have taken over that.

3. Lorna Jane’s Blog: This blog is a gold mine for API lovers. It also covers a lot of developer relations and dev-ex. Really a perfect combination for something I want to read and talk about.

   1. Overlays in OpenAPI and avoiding oversharing APIs

      1. This is a gem. We can trim off or add certain things to the spec in certain points of the pipeline of the API Spec.

      2. This is so powerful for removing internal APIs and only exposing user facing ones, while still having the rich documentation for humans (now AI agents) to understand the actual api underneath.

      3. Being able to do this programatically is amazing and makes a API pipeline so controllable and rich at the right place and time.

   2. Using Tags in OpenAPI Spec

      1. I was confused as to what the use of Tags was actually, might be for listing certain groups of related api. I didn’t think of grouping in the documentation page and elsewhere. I was just puzzled as to where it could probably be helpful. This article just made it clear.

      2. “Quite a few of the documentation tools will render the endpoints grouped by tag which is very valuable”. That is what I wanted to hear. Nobody made it quite obvious.

      3. Now I see the header like sections, I can now think, those are the tags, yes, so the APIs inside those tags might be related.

   3. What’s new in OpenAPI 3.1 Spec

      1. The type having a array of possibilities is so cool. We can basically have a union like datatype in python here. Powerful.

      2. The webhook thing, i must say it always confuses and frightens me. I always associate webhook to clients, I get scared. But this article clears that too

      3. Suppose we are writing the Stripe’s API Spec. The customer of stripe, some fancy startup needs a event to send to the user when it happens, so the URL is defined by the user. So we don’t add the URL, we specify the event name (by convention not necessarily enforced) and the method. If there is a method then there must be request and response to provide those.

      4. There are other changes as well like the override in ref and info block has a summary field now.

      5. By the way, there is a 3.2.0 released as well https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/releases/tag/3.2.0 by the time of this post. It feels good that there is still innovation and releases happening at for granted taken things like APIs.

   4. Tips for better documentation with OpenAPI

      1. Summary and description are really undervalued. I cannot love a API if it doesn’t have relatable and to the point humanly descriptions and summary, even a simple one liner helps a ton.

      2. Does than will do is really a good thing to keep in mind to build trust

4. MDN Docs for HTTP Methods: I didn’t paid closer attention to these HEAD and OPTIONS method, but now all of them make sense. These are utility methods, nothing for data, but for communication meta information.

   1. OPTIONS

      1. This is the request that asks for the available options in a API URI endpoint. It receives the response in response headers only, there is no response for a OPTIONS request.

      2. It usually has a 204 No content response status and rightly so, since its purpose is to make the caller(client) aware which methods are available on the API.

      3. It gets the headers like this `

         Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE

   2. HEAD

      1. The header is powerful to get only the headers and not the actual response.

      2. It is usually used to check if a resource exists, save bandwidth. It might still fetch the resource till the request leaves the server.

      3. Pretty handy thing to know that this exists and can even use and implement one.

5. GitHub’s REST API Spec

   • That came as a surprise a 3 MB file with references! What a rain of API Endpoints and Components. And the dereferenced one is 10 MB. WOW! I haven’t seen text specification that huge.

Watched

• API Evangelist Conversation with Lorna and Kin Lane

  • Overlay is a big thing that happened in the OpenAPI world. Rightly so. It creates a bridge between everyone by removing (mostly) the things that are not needed and keeps them for certain kinds of people (like developers those who work on integrations).

  • Developers also no longer need to clutter their core API description with language-specific metadata. Instead, these details can be applied as an overlay right before the SDK generation step that is neat little thing.

  • Kind of exciting that such a “boring” thing (I dont think its boring at all, just people have started to think in comparison to AI-tech) is still in progress and never stopping or getting discouraged by it. Gives me a lot of hope too.

• Hands on with Splotlights’ Spectral: API Linting for better Specs and Governance

  • This was a great 1 hour video, really covered the most important thing to note about spectral, you can define your rules. That sometimes is a bit wired, right? Because what’s the point of the specification then, the point is that not everyone can accommodate the rules in every scenario, and more importantly the OpenAPI Spec is just the surface that brings the producer an the consumer on the same ground, so rules must be shared upon.

  • I immediately setup this tool with my Neovim config and it works like a charm.

  • Having the ability to write programmatic rules with js is so underrated. It opens a infinite possibilities.

• Beyond the AI Hype

  • This is a great video coming from the Indian background. It gives me hope that there are believers and people who truly understand the technology in and out and don’t play the hype.

  • The subject-matter-expert requirement is so crucial, the term “You create it, you only test it” is baseless as rightfully said. LLMs don’t have your conception of “right”. The professional who has spent years and decades learning it does. Right now we are in the boom phase where the cost is lower and looks lucrative enough to make the bare minimum thing possible.

• Deep SWE Bench

  • Ok, this is cool. I thought the same, if the benchmarks were open, won’t any lab just gamify it? Just like Meta did with LLama 4 I think.

  • Though the critique of making something closed sourced besides the open source test suite is important.

  • I don’t know if GPT models are that good, like I haven’t use Codex since a month, and not sure if I am missing on it. Claude code is good but the 5 hour window limit is so annoying.

• JSON Schema Tips and Tricks

  • This was a good live stream, from the maintainer of the JSON Schema org itself is so cool.

  • The ajv usage for building linting rules is like the right piece to build a tool. Like import a validator engine and write set of rules to make it your way, really nice.

  • It didn’t went into the JSON Schema specific details which I wanted to understand more in depth, but it was a good fundamental clearing guide on validation.

• OpenAPI 3.0 from idea to implementation

  • Another great video from Postman team. They really love APIs don’t they.

  • It was a amazing refresher to OpenAPI, I haven’t looked into API specfications in a couple of months now, found it the right way to dab into the fundamentals and brush up the concepts.

  • AI Psychosis is real, it makes you forget certain things that you knew were interesting. I learn all of this first in 2024 and found I knew most of them since I have worked with them in the past couple of years. Be it writing the openapi spec from scratch for all the apis at work for a product company or updating and revamping an API and its specs too. It was a time which I loved to work with but Agents came and hijacked that urge to learn more. Here I am back on track.

Learnt

• HTTP Head and Options Methods

  • I have written posts for the 5 methods in Golang series(GET, POST, PATCH, PUT, DELETE). But never covered these two. I don’t think its covered much. I would like to write about it now. Weather people read it or llm will read it or not, I will write it.

  • HEAD as explained above is for getting the header only part of a response without the server sending the actual response.

  • OPTIONS is for exploration of the API endpoint, it returns the header only, specifying what methods are available.

• OpenAPI Specifications 3.1

  • I didn’t knew it was still being developed and maintained with more additions. It felt really a breeze of fresh air, that we all need in the world of AI.

  • But the point being, that it added support for the API to convey that it will send webhook for a named event with a specific set of request and response for that given method. The name of the webhook is important because that is the only differentiator from the other webhooks if any (you can skim through the request and response body otherwise)

  • The tiny little additions is what makes me feel good, that there are people still trying to build and improve things.

• Spectral/YAML Lint Setup on Neovim

  • I added vaccum and spectral to the LSP setup, and wow it made writing specs so easy and informative.

  • I am looking forward to doing livestreams by exploring these openapi specs and writing my own. I have a grand idea for openapi learning and mastery.

Tech News

I tend to take a break from this tech news, its a lot of paced things. Maybe this week was nothing noteworthy of catching my attention. But surely there is something brewing up and released. I am consciously aware that its moving too fast, and maybe I don’t want to keep up with it, I just cannot. I will read some articles if I find it interesting here. This week, nothing to speak and list about.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#796th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the week. Will be out on Sunday. Saturday will try to learn as much as I can about OpenAPI and API designs. I really had a itch from the beginning of my software career to devvelop APIs, but never really sat and spent months on it. Life is a bit tough, but focus and discipline is something that can get you what you want to.

Hope your life is good, and if not, I wish it would be soon. have hope and keep learning, keep the flame of curiosity alive, it will eventually play out.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Happy Coding :)

Leave a comment

It was a work heavy week. Trying to build a better habit and sticked to it the entire week. Feeling great again, a bit stress and ai psychosis maybe but coping with it, thanks to the good habits. I started writing an page on paper, not my thoughts, a story, maybe childish memories and essays, but it helped me feel better, just 1 page a day. I also started reading consistently 10-20 pages a day. I finishes two books over the weekend and started another 500 page book after a 3 month gap. I read books around 150-200 page range. Its great so far, will update next week how it went.

I am finally thinking to live stream this weekend at last. Maybe it won’t happen depending on my energy levels. I want to practice coding again, the old school way. I want to learn elixir or more golang.

This week I interacted heavily with AI, claude and cursor as harness. I love them both, I like the intelligence of Claude and the ergonomic and swiftness of cursor. I use cursor when my 5 hour limit exhausts in 1 hour. I think I am learning how to work with them. I make mistakes and waste tokens, but that’s how you develop a intuition on what will work and what won’t next time around. The models are not changing that rapidly each month now, from the past couple of months I believe. But that is life now, no pair programming, its pair ai to work and stare at.

Quote of the week

“A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.”

— E.B. White

Ah! Library! If only Mumbai had a few more. Still being able to read free books in this digital world is a blessing. I can’t express in words how good I feel when reading a book, the characters, the moments all just make you feel a little seen, a little taste of relation and hint of emotion. That is what I need when escaping from this AI-slop and productive-focused work. I will continue to devour books.

Read

1. We should be more tired than the LLM Model

   1. Of course we are. But not by slowing down and doing the trad coding, but by spiraling into Agentic code gambling. I might coin that term. Its quite exhaustive to be honest. Not that I love it, I am forced to work this way, with AI, we are asked to be more productive, more smarter. How to address that query?

   2. When to switch from agentic coding to trad coding. Do we even have a choice at this point? The expectations and the reality is just staggering with a divide. In the middle are developers, crumpled with expectations of gains and productivity.

   3. I just wish we all had a choice, but life is harsh and cruel at times, there is no option than to face it. I guess that’s how you learn lessons and be a man with scars and experience. Its rough out there, not gonna lie, exciting yes, but dreaded by expectations.

2. Can we have a day off?

   1. Beautiful. What a sarcastic blog.

   2. If we are 10x productive, then can’t we just take friday off? Yes, we should be technically, but that’s not how it works right? Or I should say, they don’t want us to. If you are productive then we can do more work, that is the new north star metric right. I hope that doesn’t make us literally reach the north pole. Cold.

   3. This won’t be sustainable I can see, working 10x productively and still having the same day structure of rest and work, is not going to make people happier or healthier. It might have impact later in their lives.

   4. I am not joking, I have started exercising, just walking the least an hour. It has helped me stay a bit more attentive and focused. Its not easy to work 12 hours and still get the motivation to work each day, day after day, 5 day a week. Even sometimes, “you can work over the weekend maybe” and “take next week off”. That is just like saying, “suffer now” but rest later, no remedy just take the cure later, no precautions.

3. Various LLM Smells

   1. We all have known “em dashes” and “delve” as LLM smells, but this goes beyond it and lists a few more. The voice of the language just gives away if you have generated enough and read enough. Why both? Well, you must know if something is LLM-generated in front of your eyes, you cannot trust anything anymore, if someone says this is AI generated, how can you know if you have not generated some and read that?

   2. The website generated by LLM oh! The buttons, the pills, the cards are all give-aways of slop. If you have generated and seen that first hand then only you can smell it.

   3. I would say “To be able to smell, you need to cook and taste and smell it yourself”

4. Tony Olieverio: The worst interview I ever had

   1. Wow! I thought it might be catastrophic system design or brutal hard leetcode. Sigh! It was a cultural fit question.

   2. How can one reject a candidate if he was honest in his terms, and even if it was not fit for them, why not put it right in the start without interactive element. I think I am wrong here. That rejection might be a great thing for the company as they saw he was not the right fit (maybe). But that candidate had to take the toll of that decision. Its not easy for some kind of people (like me, introvert max) to express their emotions, or even experiences verbally to a person.

5. Orchid Files: I’m tired of talking to AI

   1. Wow! The title should be 2026 in a gist.

   2. I have sometimes done myself this at work. But not in real-world conversations of some other person. Using AI is good but it cannot do what a human conversation can. It cannot inspire a deep cord in the nervous system that a human connection can.

   3. Yes it can give you ideas and inspiration, but that won’t stick like a real human connection can.

6. How soon is now in PostgreSQL?

   1. Great article. A good thing to know that now doesn’t take a new time in a transaction, it keeps the same timestamp the better way to use a current time in the transaction is clock_timestamp() , that makes it uniquely timestamp each call inside a transaction.

   2. Neat little thing to know before you shoot yourself on the foot.

7. Opaque types in Python

   1. This is neat. To encapsulate the data and not overwhelming the user of the software to all the details, just providing/exposing the abstract thing to customize or compose the object is better. It lowers the maintenance toll on the developer and prevent the code from bloat and convoluted logic, makes it backwards incompatible.

   2. A good idea to keep in mind while designing configuration.

8. What I’ve learned building online mini games in Elixir and Swift

   1. This is worth reading. I want to start learning elixir, I had the intuition to do so, as I set out for doing traditional coding. I want to learn a language and build good software. Not technological decision fatigue right?

   2. But elixir is good with AI today, might not be tomorrow, LLMs might improve on other languages which it can validate more. Maybe we don’t ever need programming languages, who knows. I don’t quite believe programming languages but it might not matter much.

Watched

• Theo’s take on “Cursor just crushed Claude Code with Composer 2.5”

  • This was about to happen as Cursor has the best data and focuses on Coding. Unlike Anthropic who loved coding initially, it has become a side quest which they think they are the crown holders for eternity.

  • The speed thing is just crazy, I cannot be more happy, like its cheap, its fast, its cray smart too. If I can get work done in multiple iterations (and it takes multiple iterations to be honest, no model can 90% one shot it, no ways, models are just hallucination gimmick, the limited the context the worse the output)

  • Speed might be double edged sword too, since it can produce slop 2x the speed maybe, because if something gets quicker and cheaper, it becomes very hard to resist using it again and again. But we don’t have the mental cognition, or bandwidth or capacity to review and understand what it just spitted out. So reviewing and evaluation and understanding becomes a bottleneck.

  • But still its great to have this option of speed of low-level grunt work. Just to get it out of your way.For intense tasks, I don’t think developers would prefer this or any fast or dumber model.

• Theo’s take on “Claude vs Codex vs Cursor”

  • A good observation here. I didn’t see the claude code’s wired animation until now. Yes its glitchy but I think its not that gimicky right? Is it just me that finds claude code not as crazy as theo just mentioned, to get attention. However I do feel that they definitely have made it to feel “productive”. Yes. All coding agents do feel like it. Honestly. It happened to me with codex, because I was exploring these and claude code is not for free users, I started using codex extensively in the month of Feb-March and it was really addictive.

  • The codex GPT models are really good at doing work, good work. And that just made me go wild and build wired things, that I might have thrown out as a ambitious project. Amp has been the same kind of a drug dealer too, its a lotttt faster than codex and claude code, but not great accuracy wise (I am talking from a free user perspective).

  • Cursor is a separate league, its just perfect for me. It has good ergonomics, no screen flicker like claude code and codex. It is just amazing to work with as a reliable agent. I have used it for I think 8 months now, and have just loved it. I hate claude code but have to deal with it just because it is smarter. And also it has the annoying 5 hour cap, the cursor feels limitless, though I am subscribed from my org’s behalf.

• The Standup: Adam from Open Code and recovering from AI Psychosis

  • Oh that is AI Psychosis. I thought it was gambling addiction XD

  • The problem of “I don’t know what I want to build, let me prompt it anyways” is real, that is a gateway drug to the slot machine and gambling like traits for programming. It starts by some thing it created by a simple prompt and we are in awe, a dopamine hit to extend that prompt and try again with this tweak, by checking that, by asking it to patch it and all of that instruction to make it work. But it spirals into a loop.

  • Everyone is being suffering from that, only few are lucky or I should say earned position, luxury of being able to take time off. Not everyone can take a week break and find it better, rather its extremely double the tasks from normal. People are just crazy on how developers can be used. They want us to use AI as a native tool. I understand that, but it cannot happen over-night and especially not in times of deadline of client requirements. Juggling between client expectation and AI psychosis is a pain, a literal head ache.

  • I don’t when will this era be over , its too mentally taxing and if not broken it can lead to a bigger burnout that nobody talks about.

• Aaron Francis: Agent orchestration shouldn’t be that hard

  • Well, this was a moment for me to be honest. I started using claude code in full capacity, and for the first time I saw it spawning sub agents.

  • Like 10s of them for each thing I requested. It felt like it will collapse into context junk and my 5 hour limit might just go in a puff. And it went eventually but after completing the core tasks, the sub agents that were spawned were completed and the main agent had summarized the findings, which was a surprise to me. That was the first time I saw agent orchestration.

  • I don’t if that is a big problem right? I mean agent orchestration. I don’t know if people can afford to have multiple agents as in codex+claude code+amp. All are hell expensive. I can barely purchase my domain and keep that going for a year, rest aside the ai subscription is not cheap.

  • But for someone using all of them, yeah there should be a way, a singular way to consistently manage those agents and subagents. Solo looks pefect for them.

• Coding is no longer the bottleneck as English is the new programming language

  • Hot take here. I thought he was going to agree to that, what a clickbait. Not saying it was bad, I loved that rage. I wanted it more. This is the awareness that we need to create.

  • Subject matter expert is something that LLMs might struggle with and English is not a tool, its a medium to express it. If you cannot express the intent (which you won’t be, because you cannot understand everything and don’t have the experience of that thing) its not going to understand it. Simple right? If I say “bring me water” that’s vague right? Where to bring it, how to bring it, for what. The context is missing, the intent is not conveyed. Just like that, you cannot express in english for what you cannot understand.

  • English might be a good abstraction, LLMs have lowered the abstraction, but the problem remains to understand the problem. That is the last thing that will be replaced by LLM and I bet never will.

Tech News

• Anthropic Drops Opus 4.8

  • They admit its not a great improvement, but its more “honest”. Which translates their previous models were dishonest, or less honest. This model has similar hallucination or dishonest percent like mythos in that chart. A bold claim.

  • Also they are planning to release Mythos in coming “weeks”. A month earlier it was “Risky” to share in the open world and now its ok? In a month it was ready?

That’s it from a long week. It was not that long, but a bit too much to do without a peace of mind. Will take the weekends as usual to recharge but if I have the energy to speak or engage in a live stream would gladly start one.

Thanks for tuning in this week, hope you have a great week-and-end ahead!

Happy Coding :)

A continued week of heavy client call-patch work and some inspiration to learn again. I think I have stopped learning. I need to get into it as soon as possible, but one thing that holds me back is “why”, like people are just racing with tokens and not bothered to understand the structuring of software. I am not sure, if writing code by hand again is worthwhile, its not, but how to make decisions when LLM hallucinates or we want to go a bit deeper from what it understands.

This is a question, I want to grapple and write about. I might produce a blog post about it. Or maybe even start a live stream. I haven’t streamed in maybe six months, the last stream was advent of code, yes I think. Should I get back. Everything boils down to why right? Code is just a commodity that anybody can make, how thought-out it is, that is entirely on the assumptions of the whim of the LLM, they can only go as far as the model’s prediction intelligence. And to be honest, that is quite a powerful one now-a-days.

This rant gave a bit clarity, but not quite firm one. It really needs to seep into the deeper questions that I can only write in a open ended blog post.

Quote of the week

“To distance yourself from the machines, aim to be as improbable as you can be”

— kevin kelly

What a line. I just love this blog.

Be ambitious. We have been, we need to be more now. We have to be unpredictable. We have to be super curious. Its not hard I think, its just the lack of direction and right mindset people have.

Read

1. Last 6 months in LLMs in 5 minutes

   1. This is wild. Just wild. How quickly things are moving. We saw the November inflection point, of “oh oh, AIs can write code reliable now” to “how much lines of code can we produce in a day?”.

   2. Where is this going? God knows. But one things is certain that its not going anywhere. And its annoying a bit.

   3. The Open Claw moment was a big one, it showed the point that its now possible for LLMs to do almost anything. But nothing has happened after that, maybe a sign of security issues.

2. Andrej Karapathy joins Antrhopic as a Researcher

   1. No ways. Oh my god! Why Anthropic? Did he too had any arguments with Sam. Revenge or just curiosity, I think of later to be right as per his personality.

   2. But this looks a bit scary, Anthropic is not under a good leadership, or motive, ah! Maybe I am not really at position to speak that, but still it bothers me when they say “engineers won’t be needed anymore”, like what harm have they done to you, why are you so obsessed over to dethrone from their jobs.

   3. But anyways, a good guy in a bad company might change the direction of those.

3. Elena’s Growth Scoop Substack: Your job is changing faster than you think: You’ll get fired in 2027 (it was a bit negative title I think)

   1. I didn’t like reading this, maybe its a bitter truth. Maybe the jobs are going away?

   2. For some reason that is very hard to digest, it cannot be right. Like the base on which humans operate, that is removed then why even create it. what’s the point if its taking away the joy from our lives.

Elena's Growth Scoop

Your job Is Changing Faster Than You Think

Edit: Originally this post had ‘You’ll get fired in 2027’ headline. I changed the headline…

Read more

2 months ago · 434 likes · 46 comments · Elena Verna

4. Thoughts on people and blog

   1. Yes, its about the human connection. The “appreciate your work” goes a long way than a month’s paycheck. Not for all but for some.

   2. In this day and age, that kind of connection has become important then ever. I cannot stress this that people must write online no matter how cringe it sounds, or no matter what AI steals your work. Its not a asset for you, its an investment or a seed that you are planting that you won’t necessarily seep the fruits of.

5. Kevin Kelly Substack: Your most improbable life

   1. What a piece of writing. What a way to inspire life.

   2. The more you go towards your own self, you become lesser and less replaceable. What a line. I don’t know but I needed this.

   3. Just read this, you will find what you need, really! Its beyond the measure of what we are capable of, we are not limited by 32k or 1M context window, we have unlimited memories and believes that LLMs can fathom reach there.

   4. We have the intrinsic motive to drive some things, that LLMs can’t produce a token without.

6. how to call an API from Email

   1. This is cool. Emails don’t have javascript, thank godness, otherwise LLMs would have become ….. the doom of humaity.

   2. AMP, ok interesting I thought it was the CLI agent. Never mind, need to read it a bit.

Watched

• Dwarkesh Podcast: What rebuilding Alpha Go teaches us about AI andR RL

  • This is such a great video. It explains or I should say converses in such a understandable human language, rather than buzzwords and in the air topics.

  • I haven’t completed watching the full video, but so far it has given me a great understanding of what Go actually is, what problems it has compared to chess, and also how AI is being used to self-play it.

  • I like Go now as well, the reason I love chess is its deterministic yet infinite possibilities, there is no luck factor. The mathematics required to solve such complex games is very interesting, a bit confusing at first, but it can be understandable if put enough thinking and time in it.

• Theo: Spending 40k for just 40 on GitHub Copilot

  • “It isn’t a rugpull, we are just stupid”, no no, we are stupid yes, that’s true, and that is also not a rugpull, but don’t forget, they don’t have the compute to provide the tools. And they say, it will eventually be free, and unlimited.

    Humans have spent centuries in solving the fuel problem or energy problem, is it unlimited?

  • Really lazy of GitHub and Microsoft of not seeing the severity of the pricing structure. Maybe it was a trick to getting people lured in, hooked and then asking for money, just like any other business model. Get them hooked and then present the bill. They will pay whatever it takes.

• Vasilios Syrakis was laid off by Atlassian

  • This is a great video, and the video after it too. It explained his situation and the position and the things he has worked upon over the 8 years at Atlassian.

  • Looking at this, it feels like I am doing nothing, maybe imposter syndrome. But the guy addressed this too, saying that you might be in a different subject. Which is partially true, but being a backend developer, most of the terms felt like foreign to me. Really need to broaden and deepen my skills.

  • The guy has no college degree, he worked as a desk guy for the initial years and self taught himself CS, what a inspiration. He has given me some hopes to learn again. Maybe AI is just a FAD, and we’ll realize just soon enough to learn again.

• Teej devries: Software writing Software

  • Just in time software. Ah! What a presentation. It made me think back again, maybe neovim might not be obsolete, even if it becomes, I can still use it, because no one is going to judge you or ask to use other things.

  • I will admit, I haven’t opened a editor to really write a line of code from scratch in months now. Feeling the heat. I need to learn more.

  • But the idea of this, hey get this thing, and its there, is just fantastic. I can see myself being able to build a like this, but this is only possible when I am in the weeds, making stuff.

• Primeagen: Coinbase layoff and restructuring

  • This is interesting, I am seeing this a lot, seen myself. Not sure where it might end up in, but it feels like the mixture of over hiring and the hype of AI at peak.

  • Yes, coinbase is something very transaction heavy, and the statement was wired “Non-engineers (non-technical) people to produce code to ship to production”. I am not against non-technical people being able to write code, but I am thinking why can’t they weigh what is at stake, like its a critical business. One transaction here and there, its gone bro!

  • Writing code has become cheaper, and if engineers are being fired, then that means writing code at that company was a labour type of thing. Because writing good software hasn’t become cheaper yet. The agents are able to work effectively in codebases where engineers have spent years and years of experience and thinking into it. It hasn’t been built within a day of 37k lines of code sprints. Its coming boys, that realization that software engineers don’t just write code, they translate human requirements to software not code.

• Philip Choi: If you are ambitious but inconsistent in tech, watch this

  • Wow! banger. Maybe this was a bit of AI, the cliche words and taglines were a bit predictable. But the intent was good that’s what matters.

  • The call to actions, of picking up a stack was feeling like AI, yes, but is actually somewhat true, not perfectly true.

  • But the bigger point was passion as a fuel, I can feel this. This is bhagvad geeta. Don’t rely on passion, use duty as the way forward. Correctly said.

  • Emotions can play with your motive and they are not consistent, that is its nature, you cannot control that, but you can control what you do with that, that is your responsibility. The sense of duty is what will lift one up.

Learnt

• If everything is generated by AI, is it worth building by hand code anymore?

  • I know its called trad coding (traditional coding I think), But does anyone value it, or is it worth it? Because code is not an art, it in some sense is. I mean architecting, thinking about structuring and the intent behind its use. But who cares right?

  • Why it is that when I started my career, it had to happen, couldn’t I have given a few years of time to live.

• I am not learning lately, its just context switching and prompting to do things

  • I don’t like it, but after the sessions, I am totally exhausted, I don’t have the time to review the code, nor the capacity to go through the 5k line it has spitted.

Tech News

• Google releases 3.5 Flash and Omini

  • Google IO was mid week and we saw a lot of wired unexpected killing of projects from Google, a closed source agent in favor of open source, that is a big mistake maybe. Google, don’t become the next anthropic.

• Cursor drops Composer 2.5

  • They now have the compute, the data, it is going to be a next level of deal.

  • The model is fast hell yes, but its darn capable too. This is the model that I want for coding, zip-zap fast, but yes that can create slop too if not moderated.

• Qwen 3.7

  • They just are relentless, doesn’t matter how small the improvement is, they keep on with the closed source labs. A great sight to appreciate.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#794th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Its a wired time to be writing these days, I must say, writing might be the next thing to get smothered by AI, its already there. I won’t ever sell my writing for AI. I will still hand chisel my words. It brings my thoughts to life, no matter how easy it can be to do with AI, the effort is worth it when done with bare hands.

Happy Coding :)

Week #94

It was a hectic week. Didn't even get time to do almost anything outside work for more than 2 hours.

It was a great and satisfying week nonetheless. Like interacting with the user and understanding the requirements is a good thing, not daily but sometimes its important for developers to know the pain points. I didn't write any lines of code but generated maybe half a dozen thousand lines if code that works and solves a business problem.

I spent majority of my time, setting up things, writing promots, understanding document structures and the overall things that require on the top of llms, not just basic things. Those basic things LLM cs single shot it, but to make it behave consistently, structure, comparing the right things and giving the right context was critical. That is something is a bit draining too. So, a bit low on energy snd focus. Will come back next week in a fresh excited mood probably.

Quote of the week

“There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work.”

— Charles Spurgeon

Yes I can now comeback to full circle. Having no work does also drives you fatigue, but it doesn't give any value, rather it pushes you down further in anxiety. On the other hand, having a lot of work, sometimes pushes you up.

Read

1. From today software engineering is dead

   1. Feels good to read this. Gives kind of a good satisfaction that it will still be there. Just like photography.

   2. I agree it will become more accessible that is the part I am happy about because people would develop empathy for every developer. Its not easy to build good software will eventually be realised to them.

2. God, AI is making me dumb

   1. This is an AI psychosis moment for all of us, perhaps a wake up call?

   2. Being mindful about doin anything hasn't been so valuable ever. Delegating is so easy now, only if you know when to take the control back. Else you might be an autopilot.

3. I am going back to writing code by hand, please readthe full article

   1. This is a hilarious article. For one it just is amazing how a person can work on a side project for 30 weeks.

   2. Second its hard to relate because models keep changing and every model starts doing its own style, it becomes a saphegetti of code. So I dont know it can be compared to writing code by hand.

   3. But the only part that is worth noting is the taking control of the structure of code, that is worth learning else you might doom yourself.

Watched

• React from scratch

  • Wow, that was really cool. The level of questions one asks before learning something is so underrated.

  • I feel I haven't this type of thing in a long long while. I should be doing this, but again so tired after a week, the weekend just slips away.

  • Need to force it otherwise this looks like a backward moving train for me

• Creator of SQLite on AI, Turso and 26 years of code

  • Wow! His stance is stubborn but consistent. Try us you know? Try to replace sqlite and you will fail, what a evil smile that is. What a pride to have. Genuinely good work pays dividends. Decades after decades.

  • Will Turso die? I am not sure, but they are providing everything for free which doesn't looke sustainable, maybe its too early to get developers in, but I won't trust anything after herokus gamble.

  • AI is a good assistant but not a great master is what I can feel it from him. You cannot just let it rip apart a codebase.

• We all fell for agentic coding

  • Ok this is hitting me hard. I have never been able to manage a team, when I do I am alone. I get overwhelmed and break and burnout.

  • I am not sure what I be doing right now, or what a 2 year future self looks like. I am in a hazed fog. I need to navigate out of it.

  • A good developer is a relative term but a good team person is not. And that just makes me feel like alone.

• I don't like programming: clickbait

  • Well, he isn't completely wrong but its bitter truth. Some jobs are not what they promise to be always, they change with time.

  • The jobs of developers with AI agents have become like managerial and very context switching. Which for developers is very costly. It might even reduce productivity after a few

Learnt

• You can use csv parser to escape comma in a csv string only if its quoted.

• HTML is the new markdown?

• AI Coding Agents can keep a lot of things in their context which I can hardly think

Tech News

• Grok Build: Still code is the moat for unused GPUs?

  • A quite late entry in the ai cli agents i would say, because they are desparate to get good useful attention.

  • Grok is a decent model, good at searching and finding out and summarising things. But it doesn't feel good, its too honest and cringe and cliche like censored at times.

  • People are using it the wrong way, and they have added measures to supress the illegal usage, but that just leaves them with a lot of compute and time to waste.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#794th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Thats it from this long week, wrecked my back. Learning is something I am getting back into, its getting harder and harder to get back it seems but the more further we go, the harder its going to get.

Maybe now its time to change from Happy Coding to…

Happy Learning?

No

Happy Coding :)

It was a work heavy and cozy week, had a long weekend. AI is here, going nowhere, so trying to learn it as much as I can. Its a bit of a tricky phase of world, nobody is sure what is the right way and what is a tumbling down hill. It is usually is like that in life, but this is extreme, people are questioning their existence and stating that AI is conscious, as we even don’t know what conscious means.

Quote of the Week

“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.”
— Rumi

This is such a lovely quote. I try to keep quite as much as possible, I am shy that is a different point. But I feel there is no need to speak in most of the situations, it just feels waste or just sugar coating. Maybe I am a bit blunt, I speak only when I feel something is wrong or the situation is out of hand.

But when we are quite, not just in the literal sense, from the mind, the thoughts are quieter, we can observe more carefully and open-mindedly. It is a reason why I can see and feel things many can’t. To be able to hear someone or something, you need to calm your self and the mind first, assumptions kills more things than anything else. The bias and the pre-concieved knowledge hurts more than bad knowledge.

Read

Surprisingly I didn’t read much this week. I spent more time working with the clankers. It was a bit unsettling at first, but then it becomes a habit to delegate everything to it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t read at all, I just didn’t read tech-related stuff. I read 2 book on the long weekend, all cozy and korean-japanese style lofi books. Because I just need a bit of time to escape this technical jungle. I don’t hate being there, but sometimes a fresh air is required to sustain. I read “Every day I read” and “The housekeeper and the Professor”, beautiful books.

1. Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer more than I had like

   • This is true. The agents are producing so much code that a human cannot even keep up to. But that shouldn’t be a excuse to not learn what the changes have been made. At this point its about slowing down and letting ourselves savor what LLMs in the past 3 years have made us.

   • The other part is very interesting of not getting concerned about being replaced as a developer. The analogy of plumber hits right.

   • If one can quickly plumb his house things, why even hire a plumber. But we know that we don’t like doing that so we hire him eventually. But can this be true for software too, it has been the most sort of thing that bugs people. Coding is not trivial, yes writing code has become due to AI, but code was not the bottleneck. The patience level of a developer, the ability to reason through, to find the gaps, to have a taste, to understand human sentiment, it is what truly makes a true software developer if not less. And that AI would never be able to do (atleast for the next year maybe)

2. We programmed a program to program new programs (2011)

   • Imagine being 15 years ahead of time

   • Just banger. How can one have written this is 2011, what a pscyhosis moment for him/her it would have been.

Watched

• Andrej Karapathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

  • That was a good interview. His examples are great. The Menu Gen. Maybe its peak AI.

  • The analogy of custom UI was just min blowing, we wont fret over a bug, we will be fighting with versions now! Ew I don’t like where this is going.

• What’s Next for Software Tracking and Git?

  • Oh, codeberg, forgejo. That sounds familiar, I thought we might not need them. Oh! GitHub’s normal always available has just made me delusional I think. Yes that hurts, that we can view a person’s history over decades. Pufff! Gone.

  • The hiring for new software developers looks a little worisome. What will people look at? I know GitHub profile is not a metric, but still it showed the person’s familiarity with dealing with software.

• DHH’s new way of writing code

  • This is a bit off putting. I thought he might say, AI is joke, its a fad. Sigh!

  • The point that, I felt like engineering manager I though I need to manage people, but these AI Agents are different. I agree. If it would have been something like a real managerial work, I might have died the moment I had to do that. Some things are just not someone’s piece of cake.

  • Yes AI Agents are really addictive. But yes health and family comes first still.

  • The teams moving ahead might be leaner, there is no doubt, but the problem would be still the same, solve actual problems. There will be a explosion of business if that is the case, because it has to balance it out. More people in a company, less companies, less people in a company, more companies? I think this logic might work in the next 5 years?

• Why AI Agents are tither the best or worst thing we’ve built

  • That is wild. Absolute carnage.

  • AI Agents are a good thing, but as anything, it depends on how people use it. Like internet, like social media and intelligence. If set in people’s hand this can do crazy things.

  • The open claw moment is really the point for people to show the vastness and the craziness of what uncontrolled AI can do, the lethal trifiecta, Simon Wilison trademark.

• Am I Crazy? Wading Through AI Episode 3

  • Yes, I am crazy. These is a hype. It won’t make you a 10x, 100x developer. If that is the case then a person can do a year’s worth of work in a week. That is impossible. Because if that is the case, then send him on a vaccation for the rest of the year, have we seen that? Sine the work is done, he can rest in peace. But no! They give excuse of more work.

  • This is really a bit of hype. It will make you productive sure. But not the numerical one. It will help you massively in certain tasks, but slow you down terribly in others. Right task and the right tool still holds.

• Volatile keyword in Java

  • I don’t know why but I like java now. It is more verbose, means lesser chance of messing things up, no assumptions while writing. Thought that could mean there are more bugs since if we write more, it can mean more area for edit. But I like learning things, and Java is a bit challenging coming from Python.

  • The volatile keyword makes the variable read from the actual CPU instead of the cache. It brodcasts that the value has been changed and the thread has to invalidate the cache and later when it requires it, it fetches it fresh from the CPU.

Learnt

• Software can be made easily now, but that doesn’t mean people want to right?

  • Like the analogy from Simon Wilison on plumbing. You can learn how to plumb your house with youtube or learn to code by AI, write that software vibe coded. But if its really important to you, and don’t want any issues, you probably want to hire a plmber or a developer right?

  • Maybe the thing for software just breaks because no one cares what is underneath the software. But do we? If we use a pen to write things. We forget that there would be a person designing it, yes it was “made” in a factory, but its existence is due to a human’s thoughts and imagination, the care, the empathy for others.

Interesting Tidbits

• AI Map

Tech News

• Anthropic is no more Misanthropic, shakes hands with XAI/SpaceX, whatever

  • Yep, that explains this. Our enemies’s enemy is friend of mine. Anthropic and XAI have joined hands against OpenAI. This is AI Cold Wars.

• Cloudflare to lay off 20% of workforce, after Coinbase does 14%

  • Oh! This is another one. Not sure AI is the reason or is that a excuse for over hiring in the COVID era.

  • Whatever that might be, the term job security is a myth these days. There is no such thing.

• OpenAI releases 5.5 Instant

  • This looks like a flash model from OpenAI. If it was for free on the API, these might be my go to one. Haiku is expensive.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#793rd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That was it from the week 93. Time flies…

I don’t know what to do this weekend. Reading books, working with clankers, trad coding. Overwhelming is a thing in 2026 for developers. Whatever it is, you’d see something interesting in the week #94. The 2 year anniversary of this newsletter is 2 month away. Wow! 100 editions never knew I would complete them.

See ya next week, until then…

Happy Clanking ;)

Happy Coding :)

I enjoyed working this week, I am surprised I am saying that. The same thing a month back was dreading me, and now its making me wake up each morning. AI is kind of a progression and also a setback in some sense. I don’t know, but the usage will steer where the world moves with it. There will be a divide, of course, and if I am correct, it will create the biggest divide the world has ever seen.

But till that happens, just sip in the beauty of the nature, and read some handwritten articles, human voice, and some hot takes on the internet about tech.

Quote of the week

“To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

— Confucius

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

How true is that? If you know something, you are eager to express or impress, but when you don’t, you shy away or fear away. The later part is what makes us humans. The latter, the complete part, is what distinguishes us from the AI bots. They will hallucinate and pretend the opposite when they don’t know something, they are unpredictable even in the first known part.

Knowledge is not learning something, its about intuition and learning to adapt. Being honest is the best thing to do to yourself.

Read

1. To my students

   • Read this article, if you are a student or not. You will find answers and sentences that matter to your soul and not your ego.

   Above all, be motivated by love instead of fear.

   • Everyone is in fear, unsure of the future, don’t be. Recollect the feeling when you started to do the thing in the first place, I bet it was not money, if it was, and still is, then I don’t know, if it was love, keep on steering.

   Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners

   • Vibe coding, running agents, and shipping without reviewing, these are hype and will fade with time. In professional development, at least, this won’t be the standard as far as I know.

2. Ghostty is leaving GitHub

   • This is bad. Oh my god, he has spent almost two decades on GitHub. I might not have lived consciously for that many years.

   • Man, this person has breathed and lived through GitHub. I can resonate with the line “When I went through tough breakups, I lost myself in open source... on GitHub”. I have done that to some extent, too. Not at his scale, but when I didn’t get any internships, got rejected in interviews, I found SQLC, Turbot, and a handful of organisations to fill my hunger for learning and programming. GitHub was the center.

   • I don’t rely on GitHub since I don’t maintain or do any hustles anymore, just because life is tough and so is the AI hype. I can relate to the outages happening these days. One of my projects flight-observatory, had a few failing actions notifications. I thought it might be 403 or some upstream external API issues, but GitHub was the reason behind it.

3. You can beat binary search: Quad Search

   • This is creative. Instead of just halving the list, we do a buckets of 16, quads, and compute which of the buckets the element can be. Since we have the max of each bucket. We can find the bucket and parallelly then compare each element in it.

   • Surprisingly, this is better for large arrays, and with multiple cores this will outperform binary search easily. Because we are not diving the array into halves anymore, we are picking the most possible region where the element could be and parallel searching it in those.

4. Full Text search with DuckDB

   • This is quite similar to what we do in SQLite. Pretty simple. I like how DuckDB just keeps on making transitioning to modern databases, but still keeping the backwards compatibility and keeping it simple and dead easy to use just like SQLite.

5. I got sick of remembering port numbers

   • He got sick of remembering port numbers, so he just reinvented ngrok for local?

   • Yes, it is different than assigning names to services, but I feel that it’s doing that similarly. It’s a clever trick.

   • This is the phase where people are building anything they want; the idea of personal software and developer tooling is just skyrocketing.

6. AI, Tokens and the gathering storm

   • This is quite evident from the recent events and rug pull of Anthropics subsidized tokens, and GitHub’s move from tier based to usage based billing. Its on the wall, its the end of the subsidized token era.

   • The next few months might actually tell us how expensive are these tokens.

   • Local LLMs be ready for shinny demo, the dark days might be about to end.

7. I asked Local LLM to add 23 numbers, I got 7 different wrong answers.

   • My last sentence was jinxed. LLMs can’t do math yet. Sigh!

   • I did explore this last year and they failed miserably, till date this hasn’t improved. I think we can create a skill for this shall we, I don’t want it to use a python interpretter for such a trivial thing to add. Can we make them add? It would consume a bit more tokens but let’s see. I have some ideas here.

   • But the point being, Local LLMs are not quite the hype that the propreitary models live up to.

8. Agentic Coding Fatigue

   • True. This is me reading to myself. Writing code gives us the clarity, becuase we were in the weeds, we know why each of the if else was written, we knew the edge cases, but now? We just run the slot machine to “fix it” prompt and cross our fingers so that it works.

   • The balance of understanding and the need to understanding, is wide and is growing faster than ever. I don’t know which one to lean onto. The former sounds like there won’t be any harm. But the software is such a term a thing, that nobody really cares how well you understand it. Only the output matters, not the usage of design patterns or Python or Golang.

9. Do I belong in Tech Anymore?

   • This one is really rough to read through. Not that it’s bad writing or thoughts, its is dead real and truthful. I myself am not able to express the true things that I have to go through, maybe I am not as privileged or have made my situation like this.

   • The principles that the author listed are gold, make sure we point it here too

     • Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.

     • Things that are done well require time and effort.

     • You make meaning through the doing.

     • Ideas are common; effort is not.

     • There are no shortcuts.

   • Frame it in gold, or memorise them, it is better to remember this than to be a slave to an agent or a corporation that is.

10. People who don’t use AI will get left behind

    • I will frame it as “People who use only AI will definitely get left behind”

    • People would stop learning and thinking if they just learnt to use AI and not anything else around it.

11. Have you seen the new Excel?

    • Learn Excel or get left behind, learn AI or get left behind. Everyone is on a roll with hypes. I do agree, excel has just revolutionized the way people think of software or even any form of work.

    • It has abstracted the code in such a way that people rely on the results and not the code. Superb product.

    • I worry AI is doing the same, but for text generation, for code generation. It might be the de facto thing to produce custom software on the fly.

    • Until that happens, keep learning Excel ;)

12. Where the goblins came from

    • This was an interesting nerdy read. I liked they are open about it. Though they don’t back away from shoe-horning codex glazing. I don’t doubt they use codex, but its quite a bit of token-hungry and slow model.

    • The problem of the goblin is really interesting. The goblin behavior wasn’t a bug, according to them, it came from reinforcement learning rewards that favored playful, creature-based metaphors in the “Nerdy” personality.

    • Those rewarded patterns spread and amplified across training loops, even outside the original context. It resulted in a small stylistic quirk becoming a generalized model habit, showing how local incentives can unintentionally shape global behavior.

Watched

• Making Sense of the AI hype - Wading through AI -Episode 2

  • The topic of engineer writing the blog and the manager or the sales person making the video is a reality and the only needle making the AI labs floating.

  • Its all gimmick play. Models aren’t quite capable of creating a novel thing like a compiler from scratch, that is, way far currently.

• AI isn’t taking jobs its worse

  • Anthropic is eating the money, by creating fear. Like organisations need things quick so they burn tokens, for that they need to cut down on cost, which surprise is got by firing employees. So, the money eventually flows to Anthropic by cutting the job, which is hype honestly speaking. Not sustainable, they themselves have proven it.

Learnt

• String Pool in Java

  • String Pool is a special memory area inside the heap where unique string literals are stored. The idea is instead of creating a new object every time, it reuses existing strings from this pool when possible.

  • A string in a string pool is a deduplicated storage of string literals inside the heap.

• Cursor agent > Claude code

  • I like cursor agent cli, it is intuitive and doesn’t block the user, Claude code is like I(the agent) am the owner. I don’t like that.

  • Cursor has the ability to view the output of the tool calls with Ctrl+o and let the screen continue, whereas the Claude just blocks the view.

  • I hate anthropic that is one reason. Maybe, but honestly speaking, claude code is blaoted.

Random Tidbits

• https://www.numberempire.com/

  • A cool webpage to see different patterns for a given number

Tech News

• Copilot is moving to usage-based billing: The end of a subsidized token era

  • This is a sign guys, if you still think, AI is not hype. The hype was at its peak, and now its wading. The subsidized token era is over. The real cost is on the labs and the providers that are now realising the importance of sustenance.

• Warp is now open source: Another attempt to win the race?

  • This looks like a desparate attempt to get into the lead of the race, I am not against it by any chance, its a solid move.

  • More organisations should do this now, espcially the ones that created this right? Yes I am talking about A…. Never mind.

• HERMES.md in git commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing instead of plan quota

  • Again. Never mind. Nobody would be using their coding agent.

  • They don’t leave a chance to not to hate them.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#792nd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. It was a bit of a work-heavy routine. Finally feeling back, maybe not peacefully good but warmly good. Looking up to slowing down with manual coding and building some impactful things in the era of slop.

Till then,

Happy Coding :)

It was a comeback sort of week. I still kept learning Java and fundamentals. I drilled down on dependency injection, object internals, some react too in the mix. I found LLMs are good at summarizing things, some are good, some are hallucinating, some are just give up. Yes, and I have opinions in this edition about that.

The articles are a bit AI-pilled I must say, those are getting a little into my head, expect little or no article from AI next week. I had enough for the month. But yes this trend is not stopping. We’ll have to figure out to deal with AI now.

Quote of the week

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

― John Maynard Keynes

Its quite relatable here, Its not hard to develop new ideas now, we do it all the time, but now the problem is getting out of the mindset of living without AI or old mindset. It might not be completely AI but a mix of balance of conscious understanding of what to do and what to avoid.

Being a developer in this AI world might require us to shed certain ideas, the perfect code, the developer experience, the best design and all of that nitty gritty. It matters still but there seems to be no time for that, if LLMs are able to generate 10K lines in an hour, how can a human review that in a day? Its not easy, nor its impossible. But there would be a shift in this mindset of how we look at programming a few years back at least. And that change is very hard to make once it gets molded into the cortex.

Read

1. Lights-Out Codebases and the End of the IC role

   • Ouch! That one is brutal and eye-opening. Yes, looking at this, it just feels like software developer is no more a thing. But when I look at real world, nothing seems to be changed. Maybe its a bit slow, maybe people realize it slowly. But something is surely a divide.

   • Lights out codebases, this just makes total sense, I agree to that, because if LLMs just keep getting better, keep producing more code, more right code, human’s capacity to review that is out of hands. The chess engine analogy hits home. You don’t want to review the chess engine’s moves by a grandmaster right? Like what? See LLMs as the chess engine and the grand master as the developer. Yes, analysing a game between a human and a engine can be done with a grandmaster, but no one reviews code like a hobby. LLMs would react that point sooner or later where you don’t need to worry about the generated code, and at that point of time, why would one need a human developer to review the code.

   • Writing that passage got me some goosebumps, like its overthinking, but its grounded and factual. Not sure what lies for developers as a role ahead!

2. Software Engineering might not be a lifetime career

   • Maybe this is a bit negative, but factual, actually just tying up with the above post. It might not be slow, it might just wipe out the need for software workers in a single year who knows.

   • But world just changes drastically man, till 2025 people thought, software development is the hardest thing to replace with AI or robots, yet here we are the first ones to get down probably.

   • What would those people do? Farming, carpenter? use the software, yeah! we might become consumers rather than producers. No one knows.

3. AI Resistance is growing - read hackernews for better context hackernews post

   • The thread is civil but opinionated, with strong technical depth on poisoning feasibility mixed with philosophical debate.

   • Pro-AI commenters often acknowledge risks and call for better incentives, while AI-dommers focus on erosion of trust, job effects, and creative control, yeah! that is the typical conversations moving forward.

4. Developer Taste and AI Slop

   • This was an eye opening post. It is helping me understand, to differentiate generating vs developing. The code was and is never the bottleneck, what to build is. Even if that comes to you from other members upwards, a developer still has to think.

   • Anything can be made now, but if that is the real thing to make, worth it, or even needed is the question that would have an edge.

5. My dear friend you just built kubernetes

   • This one is quite funny. After resisting the complexity of kubernetes, people actually re-invent the wheel.

   • To use any tool or software, we must know exactly what we are trying to do and what that tool or software is actually doing. Not necessarily it would fit, but it would help you reach the ultimate goal a bit quicker.

6. Your company is a skill now

   • This s a bit scary. I talked about it when the open claw and moltbook thing was getting hyped. We were just a bunch of markdown files away from creating a dystopian world.

   • Markdown files are just instructions and context relevant for doing certain task and not doing the rest of the side quests. I know that sounds too simple, but that is what it is. But its not that simple. Putting ideas and limited context to words is not simple as you think it is.

   • Maybe creating or translating ideas to skills will actually be a skill in some months, who knows!

Watched

• Should you be a carpenter? Wading through AI - Part 1

  • Ok, the person who is into the weeds of AI models, himself is confused as to what to learn and what to choose as a career. This is a bit hard to swallow. Are we done then?

  • Nobody know the answer whether software is a safe career anymore. At this point, we need to define what a career actually is.

• I quit my GitHub Job because AI breaks software

  • Ok, that is positive but people can get jobs just like that? I think its quite rough out there.

• Microsoft accidentally told the truth about AI

  • Ops! Is it happening? AI Costs now trying to get better of the AI Labs. We saw with Claude subscriptions, now GitHub, cost cutting in place. First employees and now people will see the actual problem hidden underneath.

  • The tech debt after vibing everything. Maybe it won’t matter, because AI can clean it up, right?

  • But damm, the man just spoke a lot of things, they just gave me hope to be human. Just watch this, if you watch anything at all.

• Chai Aur Code - React Series

  • What a beautiful series. It feels nice to learn things. I never though React was that simple. It just injects html and js. Wow!

  • Props are just attributes that we pass around the html elements, this is just art of teaching at best.

• Did Anthropic just killed Figma?

  • Probably! This is a good product but not sure how sustainable it becomes. I mean I can use it if I have unlimited tokens and wallet to spend, otherwise its a big money burning machine.

  • And for that maybe figma is a good choice, old school. At this point, I am afraid what am I even going to see more from anthropic

• We need to talk about GStack

  • A bit of wasted hour I would feel. Never no major thing to notice, except just rambling. It was not worth the time.

  • Gstack is basically I think bash script to give skills to a agent. Nothing much, and maybe it helps you produce 40k lines of code a day. Who cares.

Learnt

• Dependency Injection with Spring Framework

  • This was a learning curve for understanding the core behind Spring Framework. Basically instead of changing values in object type, you just change it at the configuration level. So we don’t have to hardcode values. Its like the level of abstraction to define where to configure or inject the dependency. Hence the name.

  • Its quite clever to do this out of the box. In python I haven’t seen stuff like this. In django perhaps there is a way to just use settings.py and modify everything there without actually changing the model or view.

• LRU Cache

  • I tried to implement this in Java, and learnt to use Hashmap along with a linked list (doubly). Since we need to keep track of most and least recently used items, we need to be able to track it and more importantly for deleting and accessing in O(1) time, this structure just makes it quite great for this.

• Java equals and hashCode differences

  • The equals check if two objects are equal, their values and not reference value.

  • The hashcode method returns the hashcode of the object, its like the identity of the object.

  • The equals and hashcode needs to be consistent, so If you override the equals method, you need to make sure you keep the hashcode aligned with the equals too.

• React under the hood

  • Yes, I learnt a lot from the chair aur react playlist, and still learning.

  • React is a library, and Angular is a framework. React basically maintains its own DOM to effectively update the data.

• Table parsing for complex financial documents is still unsolved problem

  • Ok, I thought somewhere it might be solved but nope. Tables are a bit of a pain. Trust me when I say “pain”. A human himself cannot understand the layout, let alone LLMs. Poor LLMs. Even after giving them eyes (not realy) VLLMs are dumb too. I haven’t seen a great model like Gemini from other labs, if that breaks in, it should be a game over. But I don’t see those labs solving this problem.

• AI assisted/written articles needn’t be all slop

  • I just read this article sereis

  • https://nitinsingh717.substack.com/s/threads

  • Ok, please here me out. This is written by AI (but but). Its not slop. I honestly read it, all three posts. And it genuinely helped me understand concurrency better.

  • AI is not bad, but if you don’t have experience in the thing that you are generating, the taste (wow, everything is connecting now), then its slop, because slop is not AI-generated content, its AI-generated content that the author didn’t spent time thinking or reading about it.

  • And from the three posts I read till now, it genuinely felt that the model clearly understood the sentiment and the intuition of the author and it translated it perfectly.

  • I even discussed it with the author, and he admitted the same, humans are above LLMs for now.

Level Up Your Programming with Nitin

The Need: Why Sequential Thinking Breaks the Modern World

Series: Thinking in Threads | Blog: 1 | Read time: ~14 min…

Read more

4 months ago · 2 likes · 4 comments · Nitin Singh

• LLMs are a great tool for learning

  • Not all LLMs are equal, each has its own advantage.

  • I have found Grok to be best for search summarisation, Gemini for shallow explanations and quick searches, Claude for indepth reasoning and creative exploration. ChatGPT for general stuff.

  • Claude models are just great for agentic work, but they don’t quite search well. Grok is reallly great at searching and getting factual data in the context. These are opinions and not facts. But I have used all four enough and continue to do so, knowing what each of one can do and where I should throw which task.

Tech News

• OpenAI release GPT 5.5 - doubled the price of 5.4

  • Another release. So, its plateaued now. Models are stagnant with the knowledge, and only breakthrough would be to make it sustainable for inference, rest is looking RL and post optimizations.

• OpenAI releases ChatGPT Images 2.0

  • Oh! This is good. Like the level of detail on the image I generated for Java OOP was just top notch. The text is just flawless.

  • Nano Banana was not that good at that precision. The crown has been stolen from Google to OpenAI again.

• Canonical releases Ubunutu 26.04 LTS - Resolute Raccoon

  • I just installed it on my work laptop and it was flawless. It has no major changes, but just software upgrade. However more rust is starting to get into the linux core.

• Kimi Releases K2.6 - Open Source model are still keeping up with proprietary models, a good sign

  • Wow. Open source models are not dropping the knees. The fight is on, the open source models are not as accurate or reliable as closed source but they are getting closer. The weight is a big factor for their adoption, if they can squeeze a great model in a relative smaller size, it can be a win for those labs.

• DeepSeek releases v4 preview with pro and flash

  • The fight is on. It keeps on pressing the closed source models to get out better models and we are stuck in a infinite loop.

• Anthropic still shooting self on the foot - Mythos is over-hyped

  • Yeah! Anthropic is not leaving their steak of shooting themselves on the foot. It has been over a month and the saga continues.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#791st edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. It was a back in track, old vibes week. The next week is a crucial one, a make or break situation for me. If I am making a change, this is the moment. Its going to be hard, but I think I can give my best. The worst has already happened, there is nothing that can go worse than this situation for me. Anyways, looking forward to a positive week ahead.

Until then,

Happy Coding :)

Week #90

Another rough slog of a week. But fighting nonetheless. Hopes are the glasses we have strapped in, darkness cannot blind us.

I have been upskilling myself with a few things, locked in with handcrafted coding. I am spending at least 2 hours in the morning to solve problems without chatgippty in my way. I don’t use agents and no AI. I think there needs to be a restraint in building and improving code skills. So, planning to do weekly livestreams for that public building and tracking my progress, also it helps me be accountable of what I say and commit to.

This week I am learning Spring Boot and Java skills, I don’t know why, don’t ask me yet. But I don’t learn anything without reasons, it might be curiosity, it might be a requirement. Learning is always a skill of a developer, and each year I want to learn something different. Maybe 2026 would be a year I would learn Java for enterprise-grade? Wow, that will be a great flex to make while people are prumpting with their AI-buddies.

Quote of the week

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

— Richard Feynman

This is my mind right now. If I cannot hand code it, I don’t understand it. Your counter point might be, no one cares if you are anyone understands it or not, its code, not a form of art that is valued. Yes, that is true, users don’t care a damm if I hand coded it or the clankers generated it, but when it breaks, who is responsible. Yes, say it. It is a developer. No one can blame the clanker, people exist to blame people. I am not saying to blame it or not, but to take action and a decision from there on to resolve the issue, is only possible if I know the ins-and-out of the program, that only happens if I am in the weeds of it. Reiewing code can do it, you think, sure. Do it, and don’t complain after 3 hours of glazzing on the clankers’ 3k line of code slop.

I need to create in order to understand, I need to write it to know what it feels like to break and make. Before reviewing the code, I need to know how it works and what can break.

Read

1. Frustration Driven Development

   • Wow! No engineering is good engineering. Remove the problem from the root, well said.

     Your job is not doing the work, your job is removing work.

   • How hard does that hit? In the AI world? Automating our own job, yeah, that’s fun, right? Maybe!

   • But this is a great point, great software engineers use swear words and get the problem out of the way, and do not work around the problem. (as codex does, and Claude code just wraps around the problem when it sees it)

2. Who will be the senior engineer in 2035?

   • Totally valid point. If AI is becoming the cheap junior dev, who are we upskilling for the future?

   • The gap is already wide. In a couple of years, it might grow like crazy, and the divide of expectation and reality might hit people and developers alike.

   • There is and will be an expectation of in-depth understanding of code, but by using the AI-Agents, the quality will deteriorate drastically; developers won’t read and write code, and the instincts and the muscle memory to write code without assistance will be gone.

   • I am thinking of doing weekly streams now, to hand-code certain things. Maybe that will keep me up my ante of vim flexing and away from vibe coding.

3. Lorin Hochstein’s thoughts on BlueSky public Incident writeup

   • That is a brutal one. This is like concurrency, you thought you had one problem, but after adding concurrency, you now have two. Setting a limit on how many go-routines can be spawned in a group is critical here.

   • TIME_WAIT, that is really a neat thing to learn. The TCP connection waits for that duration before sending another FIN so that the client can be sure of the delayed packet delivery, if any. And that TIME_WAIT actually caused them to fill up all the ephemeral ports. That is 28k ports, which sounds a lot, but after reading it through, that is surprisingly a low number. If you are Bluesky scale, you might need millions of ports.

   • Diagnosis skill is something that is going to be super valuable going forward in the AI era. AI can help, but it would be too slow and can never reach the instinct-based debugging of humans (as of now, at least)

4. Six Characters: Decoding PNR Number and e-ticket system (Ajitem)

   • This is a treat. People should write these kinds of blogs. This is curiosity at its best.

   • PNR is not a unique global identifier, it’s specific to the airline or the entity handling it, it’s for passenger name record.

   • It’s quite ingenious how the currency conversion works, without breaking and keeping simple and straightforward.

5. AI will be met with violence, and nothing good will come out of it

   • Spicy take. True in most senses.

   • The CEO things are pretty messed up, people might fight and get violent, which is inevitable in any direction we go.

   • The start of the post was quite well written, if that holds true, we can actually see where this will go.

6. I’ve been blogging wrong

   • People are waking up and finding the strength to write authentic content. Sharing human experience, which was the sole purpose of blogs. But it has taken the shape of vanity metrics and technical jargon. We are so back!

7. Llama Parsebench: First Document parsing benchmark for AI Agents

   • I am a bit surprised that there are no document parsing benchmarks yet? What? Where are the Chinese labs and Msitral and all the OCR benchmarks then. Oh, they might be just OCR is it? Well then that makes sense. For document-specific parsing.

   • Another industry or field demolishing with the report card calculator ready.

8. Now is the best time to write code by hand

   • Yeah! People are firing now. This is happening. Writing code by hand can be a hobby but it will be a skill that pays like COBOL or PASCAL developers are paid today. Trust in code will be more from human than in agents, that is the bet we are making if that holds, software developers are going to be PHP developers with Lambos in their garage.

Watched

• Data Structures Explained by Nic Barker: HashMap

  • This was a solid explantion of a hash map. I actually thought it was magic, but I knew it was some hash function or hash code, but this actually clears a lot of those magical things.

  • I learnt that we can have linked list sort of a structure to tackle collisions on hashes. That is a really clever way of solving a problem.

• You are still better at editing documents than AI

  • This is a great explanation of why the software interface is skewed for agents. It was never meant for them.

  • The right set of tools and context is really important. It might also depend on the model, since its training data, if it doesn’t have the right examples on how to manipulate docx or xml files, it might skrew up big time. But I have not seen those kinds of issues from proprietary models yet.

• Vim has a 0 day?

  • This is evident, and quite not surprising to me. AI agents and slopy review system will make this worse.

  • Vim codebase was hand-chiselled for more than 30 years, it still has these vulnerabilities, now take AI into the game, and it could easily make it worse in a matter of months if not years.

  • Reviewing code and testing it will be quite a skill to have. Security essentials will be key in moving out of this kind of mess. I also read about the diagnosis skills in the read section, right from the Bluesky incident report, so that will be another skill to hone.

• Anthropic Dunking and PI pilling

  • Oh! That was a pure entertainment. Grilling Anthropic is my new pastime hobby, or I should say its Theo’s duty.

  • Anthropic is reduced to Syltherin and worse, for some time last year I was considering them Gryfindor, oh my god, how idiotic I was. I thought they shared the safety scores, and made it specific to developers so it might be nice.

  • But the CEO and the company are some evil propaganda to get funding. Good luck getting rejections.

Learnt

• Difference in this and super in Java OOP

  • I understood that this refers to the current object instance and is primarily used to access instance variables, methods, or constructors within the same class. super refers to the immediate parent class and is used to access overridden methods or parent constructors. The important learning was not just usage, but when ambiguity arises (e.g., variable shadowing or method overriding) and how these keywords resolve it.

• Internal working of HashSet and its relation to HashMap

  • I realised that HashSet is backed by a HashMap, where elements are stored as keys and the hashvalue as its value. This means all properties of hashing, collision handling, and performance characteristics come from HashMap.

• Design Patterns from Spring Boot

  • While studying Spring Boot, I learnt that Dependency Injection (DI) is a way to provide an object with the dependencies it needs from the outside, instead of the object creating them itself. This separates what a class does from how its dependencies are created. Without DI, a class directly creates its dependencies using new, which tightly couples it to specific implementations. This makes code harder to test, extend, or replace. DI removes this by depending on abstractions instead of concrete implementations. Its pretty good pattern to be honest.

• While brushing up on concepts on OOP, I also learnt about interfaces and abstract classes. An interface defines what a class must do, and an abstract class defines what a class is, along with some shared behavior.

• The software industry is in extreme ends

  • On one hand, we have AI-pilled managers and bosses. On the other hand, we have Java coorporate coder (hand-crafted coders).

  • Like if someone looks at the job market, it’s a chaos of expectations and reality. How can a field have 3+ years of GenAI experience when the field itself is publicly known to be less than 3 years old?

  • I must say, not everything is doom and gloom, there are still companies expecting people to hand-chisel code, and that is where Java enterprise comes in. Maybe that can change my trajectory, the next two weeks are the decisive ones.

Tech News

• OpenSource is in danger

  • This is bad. Yes, we had around 5 supply chain attacks in a period of 2 weeks. That was brutal, but one cannot blame it to open source, and it cannot end.

  • It is the pillar on which the tech giants and the smaller firms are standing on, it cannot be something that you go private for. Its shows the lack of trust on the 80% of the people doing good things, but those 20% of the people yes that is brutal.

• Google releases Agent CLI for building Android Apps

  • This is actually something useful. Opening Android Studio is like baking a grilled sandwich. I have to open and close my laptop 20 times and cannot build the app.

  • With the agent and the tool chaining, this could help me produce a slop of apps.

• Anthropic drops Claude Opus 4.7

  • Oh another 0.1 bump. Nothing much. This is fine, we get impressed, we suspect, and we reject it after 20 days.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#790th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from the heavy Java-pilled edition. Never thought I would be learning java, but here I am. never thought code can be generated that correctly and that fast, yet here we are. Life has a lot of surprises for us, so don’t get discouraged, you might not know what happens next.

Until that happens for good, keep your hand on the keyboard and brace yourself with the nerves of reviewing code.

Happy Coding :)

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I did a few things this week. I made a little app, wrote a half-baked draft for part 2 of the flight observatory, and learned design principles.

But something feels off.

I am feeling a bit rusty with programming lately, not sure where the joy in coding is lost. I hate managing agents, I hate reviewing 2k lines of code in 2 hours. It’s just not what I had signed up for. I am complaining, yes, but it’s just a weird thing.

Not feeling great to be honest, have ideas, but agentic-engineering seems to have completely overtaken. I am saying that I miss writing to code by hand, or I want to, but it feels like the layer of agents has replaced that muscle memory of thinking while coding.

Anyways, I still find the joy of building, not sure how long it will last. At least can be hopeful about it.

Quote of the week

“We are often most in the dark when we are the most certain, and the most enlightened when we are the most confused.”

— M. Scott Peck

Maybe, not sure. I feel I am up to something. Maybe the path is clearing up; the night is darkest just before the dawn. Keeping a positive attitude is the way forward. I think I have a lot of things to juggle and grasp, which is why I feel lost. Once I can manage the right things in the right direction at the right time, I can feel a bit confident. Cannot see the other way round. Escape is not an option, and I don’t like it either. There is no fun and learning in choosing the easier route. Ending with another quote, easy routes, hard life, hard routes, easy life.

Created

• Chessight → https://chessight.meetgor.com/

  • I built it as my experiment to learn agentic-driven development, of course, why not! I used Codex, and it just one-shotted the entire UI, I deliberately asked it to use Vue, and it did it phenomenally well.

  • Ok, what is the project? It's just a visual training application that can help you understand the chessboard and its algebraic notation.

  • The idea is simple, not to teach chess, but to train how you see the board, like g5 shouldn’t be something you calculate, it should just click when looking at the board.

  • I was watching FIDE Candidates 2026 (Prag vs Sindarov), and I was intrigued by Sagar Shah and all the other chess players and commentators who can just name the moves. I was still figuring out the move, and they named the exact step. I wanted to build that muscle memory. I looked for chess.com and Duolingo, but neither of them provides this. They don’t start from the fundamentals.

  • After playing it for a while, it feels like one of those small skills that unlock a completely different level of thinking in the game. I am not a chess expert, I don’t play chess regularly, but I like it, just for fun and flexing the -100 IQ brain of mine.

• Draft for Flight Observatory technical report and devlog.

Read

1. AI and Remote work is a disaster for software engineers

   • Spicy take. I’ve been working remotely for ~2 years as a junior-ish backend engineer, and I use AI daily. If AI + remote sabotages juniors were broadly true, I should be a pretty weak engineer by now. That hasn’t been my experience at all.

     remote work sabotages careers of youngsters

   • I think remote doesn’t sabotage. It removes forced structure. If you don’t build your own, you stagnate and just feel lost. There’s no overhearing seniors, no accidental learning, no pressure to “look busy”. If you just do assigned tickets and log off, yeah, sure, you’ll stagnate. But that’s not a remote problem; that’s an ownership problem. You can sit in an office and do the same thing.

     AI — too little brain stimulation

   • Same with AI. If you use it to skip thinking, you’ll get faster at producing things you don’t understand. But if you use it to explore, ask “why does this break?”, generate edge cases, compare approaches, it’s like having a patient senior who will walk through things with you endlessly. The difference is in how you engage with it, the intention rather than the environment.

   • I do agree that juniors need tight feedback loops and exposure to better engineers. That’s harder to get remotely, and most companies don’t compensate for it well. But the answer isn’t “go back to office”, it’s “design better learning environments”, more deliberate mentorship, better code reviews, more context sharing.

   • Also, the market point is real: AI is eating the bottom layer of trivial work. But that just raises the bar; it doesn’t remove the path. Juniors now need to show they can reason about systems, not just implement tickets.

   • The point is, if an individual is naturally curious, remote or on-site doesn’t matter, he’ll succeed in whichever environment.

2. Someone at BrowserStack is leaking mail addresses of customers

   • This is all happening. The security of software is crazy right now. We just had a week of supply chain attacks on Python and JavaScript ecosystems. And now its getting into the weeds of the application. Not too far from AGI, right?

   • I don’t reckon that the company might be leaking it intentionally, it might be some vendor they aren’t fully aware of, or have really vibe-shipped something. Not sure.

   • Excited for the next post.

3. Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices

   • Yep, this is a valid and good observation. I have mostly written my side projects in cloud functions (Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare). I don’t mind the complexity of managing a bunch of environment variables and setup. It’s a one-time thing, and I know looking for them is a bit of chaos, but I have AI-agents to clean up as and when necessary.

   • Maintaining a monolith is no joke with LLMs, it used to change hundreds of out-of-the-blue things, nonsensically, but it has reduced almost to 0. But the cost of changing one thing is still high in those environments, since a change without review can cause a catastrophic production failure. (Just like GitHub is having right now)

4. Software never had a soul

   • Beautifully put.

     “You do not even need better or faster tools. You just need to really mean it.”

   • You need to mean it, you need to care it, this is the crux of being a developer. We should not be caring about the code but caring for the user’s problem, the product.

5. People love to work hard

   • Great point. This is about not what you do, but how people empathize with your work. If they don’t they say “you don’t want to work”, if they do you can see the title of this post and read it.

   • A very human post from this author. Kind of heart-touching. There is nothing more to say, like it’s something you feel and can’t describe in words.

6. Lessons from using SQLite in production

   • Useful bit here. The WAL mode is absolutely a clutch, most people don’t know of, and just lament about it being a single-writer constrained DB. It’s a super-powerful and very versatile lightweight database.

   • Folks at Turso are making it even better with read-write replicas and syncing, having a daemon for SQLite. The future might be apps full of SQLite.

Watched

• Simon Wilison on Lenny’s Podcast

  • This was a relieving video. I thought I was the only a minority amongst the developers who got exhausted after a few hours of AI prompting. It is a natural thing. We are doing the creme layer, the ephiony of the task, this won’t be sustainable.

  • The other thing is that he had more than 2 decades of experience.I am not giving excuses, but still, that is a lot more than just a 2-3 year me trying to wrestle the concept of agentic engineering.

  • It was refreshing to see this, his enthusiasm is truly contagious. I want to build more now. But mindfully. His tools section is really wild.

  • I fit in the middle, I not a junior or a fresher anymore, I am not more than 2 years into the industry. Alas! I am in the middle. But still I think, its not doom and gloom, I am not going to be passive and let the AIs take over my brain.

• WhatsApp System Design By GKCS

  • Well explained. I thought it might be more complex or elegant. But it was neither. Its a chat app nonetheless that scales, that’s it.

• Building Zepto LLD, System Design

  • This was a good design. The system feels a bit chaotic, but was understandable.

  • The inventory, delivery, product, and everything could be a system on its own, but in the real world, systems are created by combining multiple systems.

  • Basically, we have products, orders, and order items. The inventory manager finds the product in a dark store(large storage or inventory) and then assigns the nearest dark store with those products or multiple stores, and maps the available delivery agents to those shipping those products as orders.

• How UPI Payments work

  • Oh, so every bank, small or national or not, has to go through a nationalised bank(or one of them), damm!

  • I wonder how and why that is so fast? Is it because the banks already have mapped out the route to each bank amongst them, yes, that’s probably the reason for the unified name.

• Strategy and Observer Design Pattern

  • Banger of a series. It was a great explanation, and it felt really enthusiastic.

  • Strategy patterns are like polymorphism, but for a specific component or functionality. Like payment can be a strategy pattern, where we can implement UPI, card, net banking, etc.

  • The strategy pattern is like implementing a family of algorithms and encapsulating the algorithms in their own, and we can make them interchangeable.

  • Observer pattern is like a push strategy rather than the client polling it. It makes it efficient and clean. When the observable changes, it notifies (pushes) the changes to the observers, and then it can fetch the changes since it can decide what it wants.

Learnt

• System design is a really broad field

  • I thought it was a bunch of arrows and squares. But its a little more subtle than that. It’s about abstract design, and schema too, without going into the code details. That’s a bit tricky part, because creating an abstraction not low-level as code and as high as a class or an entity is a bit tricky balance to maintain. You’ll either go all in or barely touch the core problem.

  • There are design patterns and principles to use, diagrams for them, UML, ER, HLD, LLD, and whatnot.

• Design Patterns are wired, but important

  • This came as a bummer in an interview. I knew patterns, but couldn’t recollect their names, and was dead on the lines. I wonder if people actually care about theory in the age of LLMs. It has made learning on the fly so easy that I am starting to not learn anything deeply. That’s a hard realisation to come out of.

  • This came to me, and I immediately started learning and reading about, I crunched almost halfway through “The Object Oriented Way” by Christopher Okhravi, and referencing the “Head First Design Patterns”, the mammoth of a book by O’Reilly.

  • I am finding it rewarding now to go through them. Really, LLMs might make us the dumbest creature on earth one day. The greatest devolution in the history of Earth.

• We are in a software boom, and not doom

  • I am realizing that there are more software engineer roles open, more need for software, but not quite one-to-one. It’s like people can make software that they once couldn’t, but now can do a bit easily. But the only thing that keeps them holding back is that they or anyone doesn’t know what the code actually does. And I think as software developers, this edge will be vital more than ever.

  • Till people cope with it, it’s time to go deep and explore the depths of software.

• You can make your own small LLM

  • This is very cool. I like it and found it almost at the right time. I wanted to build an LLM with some specific data, but I was not sure what that could be. This guy just created a bunch of fish and food sentences and called it a day. Legendary stuff.

Tech News

• Anthropic with Claude Mythos, Project Glasswing, eh?

  • Maybe it was a great mode, maybe it was a meh! model. I don’t know since I don’t have access. Period.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#789th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

It was a slow week. To be honest, disappointing in some sense. Not much movement or progress. But the next week might just be good or great. That’s the hope as usual.

That’s it for this week.

It was a high-action-packed week. I wrote a case study, polished a web app for that, and connected with people for regular catch up. Since job security is not a thing, as we can see with Oracle. Negativity aside.

I was really excited after the weekend, since I had all the queries and data for getting my intuitions and memories right on the Mumbai airspace case study. I wrote the blog post, which took some time; to be honest, it was hand-chiselled. But the feeling of completing it was something that nothing can come close to. It was a small thing, but I might be exaggerating it since it was a lot of work. I took 2 weeks to build it. Research on the data sources, download, and fail to load the data (it was a mammoth dataset, even sampled), tweaked and changed the architecture again and again after surprises, and finally made sense of it. There is nothing more rewarding than that.

Apart from that, I am also planning to do some live streaming, maybe for upskilling my coding practises. I am with Primeagen here, he was right that we need to have a moment with ourselves, to resist that urge to let AI handle this tiny thing, and it is infatuated with AI doing everything. I want to have my mind disciplined in writing code by hand. Maybe the future is AI writing code, but I cannot understand what it has written until I feel and write some of it myself. I might be stubborn, but that is what it is.

I read a lot of good bits and pieces this week, also I don’t watch youtube as I said for the past couple of months, it's just AI-like slop and reaction videos all over. But some of them are gems too, I admit.

Quote of the week

“When everything starts going against you, remember that Airplane takes off against the wind and not with the wind”

— Henry Ford

This is used intentionally since I made a flight project this past week or so. I wanted to relate to it, and it hit me at the right time. I didn’t breeze through the project; I faced issues that, as a developer, we have to. I learnt a bunch of things and made it through. There will be resistance in moving ahead, but that doesn’t make you stop; it makes you value that even more, it fills you with empathy and experience.

Nothing in life will be easily attained; it might be, but with subtle or bigger hurdles. You have to learn to fly through it.

Created

• Flight Observatory: Finally launched. After 2 weeks of fighting with data, it is here. I also re-designed the home page and the archive page. The webapp now displays the last fetched status for ads-b live data and archives it per hour (if the github cron job action runs on time, it writed that it doesn’t).

• Mumbai Airspace Case Study: The blog post and the case study webpage are live. It was a great one, I think the post is my all time high in terms of words (8k). I found it really enjoyable to write it, to finally validate my memories with actual data.

Read

1. I used AI, It worked, but I hated it by Taggart

   • A banger and the best blog I have read in 2026. Period. Just read it. Please give that author a hit on his site for his work.

   • But I will write about it anyways. It was a honest and blunt post, but written with both sides in mind, very balanced but favouring the other without defaming other side. Just take my money for writing this post.

   • I have been screaming this, but nobody realises it

     QUOTE ”the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? “

   • banger after banger in the post, still saying you read it, please!

     QUOTE “I turned to generative models not only as an experiment, but out of desperation. I had a need for code that did not exist. Nobody was going to help me build it, nor should I expect help for a project.”

   • How many of you fellow developers are feeling it? True and very resonating

     QUOTE ”For any new potential project, there is a voice in my head telling me how much easier it would be to let the model do it”

   • Sigh! this is sad part, we can’t box it again

     QUOTE ”If I could disinvent this technology, I would. My experiences, while enlightening as to models’ capabilities, have not altered my belief that they cause more harm than good. And yet, I have no plan on how to destroy generative AI. I don’t think this is a technology we can put back in the box. It may not take the same form a year from now; it may not be as ubiquitous or as celebrated, but it will remain.”

   • Great post. I am just processing it all. The words just hit hard and then resonate perfectly with my experiences.

2. Resilience in the age of AI

   • This is a spicy prediction. I think this is a far dystopian prediction, but you never know. I had thought software creation was a far far dystopian fantasy, but here I am experiencing it. In late 2025, I thought it was a decade away, only to realise it was a few years away and then to wake up and realise it was already happening. Damm! This AI Era….

   • The thought about privancy is really going to happen or is already happening with the dangerously skip permission or yolo modes in the code assistant terminals. This will spread in “whatever you want, take it”. This thing will test the security and design of the AI systems that we will be producing.

     QUOTE “While today there are concerns about personal privacy and security, in the future we will be much more willing to share information about ourselves to avoid ambiguity in our requests”

   • This looks feasible and could happen. They will resist it, everyone will as usual. But the thing that scares me here is there would be no linear trajectory of careers. Like if you work more harder you won’t be rewarded as much. Since AI will do the most work, you’ll just manage them, I don’t know what I am even talking about. But the trust and credibility will blur with these systems for sure, or atleast will be hard to earn as it is today.

     QUTOE “We can break down future employment categories into three major branches: those who care, those who service and those who experience”

   • Well concluded. If we need any of these, AI has failed us, humanity has not failed.

     QUOTE “If there is an ongoing need for leaders, educators, financial workers or professionals, this will be a sign that the AI revolution has ultimately failed and will signal a long-term limitation in the aspirations of humanity as a species”

   • I wonder what resliance meant in the title, I thought I was going in for a full resistance to AI, but found out the oppsite. So it would mean resistance or resliance to your older believes no longer will hold in the AI era I suppose? But older experiences might.

3. Don’t let AI write for you

   • 100% Believer in this. If you can’t write the words, you are letting the world take over you. I just wrote a 8k words, though it was not 100% by my mind, I used some inspiration to talk and extract ideas out of my results and intuitions. But I wrote the full post myself, word by word. It gives a different level of satisfaction and authority that no LLM can.

   • It also is important aspect to build trust and connection, even resonance. LLMs are blunt and boring to talk to. When I write something, I have memories and thoughts that LLM can never have. That level of detail, it can have, but the emotion and the right set of words, LLM would never take off from humans.

4. I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

   • Its actually a great post. I cannot relate on the writing side, I can always rant on for 2k words non stop just like this newsletter. But I can relate this to AI-assisted Coding. I think I might be a bit rusty if I had to hand write code now. That is something I wish not to do, but the industry is forcing the other way.

   • I never use AI to touch my words, I just use Grammarly to refine the word mistakes, that’s it full stop. Nothing ever touches the world. I throw it to ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok turn by turn to rate my writing, and I take some critique from them. I use the extra “be blunt and brutal but honest to rate this” to add a negative direction, forcing it to find mistakes. That is a good use of AI to improve your writing, but not accepting it blindly and pasting what it throws at you.

5. AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice

   • This is partially true, as I said in the above thought to add a “blunt and brutal but honest and grounded” advice, it steers the other way. Its not a sycophancy but more about instruction-following.

   • ChatGPT models are increasingly becoming instruction-following, but are overly sweet sometimes, I agree. Grok is the other way, as we know from the snitch bench.

6. Software is a feeling

   • I can see the frustration there. Maintaining a blog is wired. You want to have one thing, then another, and another and it just breaks the full design and flow.

   • Great blog design btw, it has inspired me to have my blog in a VS Code-like interface, just wondering and being a little more ambitious than I am, because I have LLMs to design it ;)

7. LLM Knowledge Bases

   • This is neat stuff. I don’t have any wikis like that. I haven’t explored something that deep that requires more than 10k lines of content. I think I need to read one deep posts or a book. I do read some short-form content like other people’s thoughts and TILs, which is not bad but not really putting my brain to think.

   • I have seen Grok do really good extraction of information (not presenting the right way, though its not a great model for conversation, I suppose). LLMs are actually getting good at summarisation and linking different ideas together. Some times they are a bit cringe and try to shoehorn some weird analogy, which I have noticed.

8. What is this job anymore

   • I think I am a bit confident to say, we are a few months away from non-technical people saying, “oh crap, this is seriously bad!” (probably some security loopholes and ridiculous architecture) and saying we need some person that can fix it, the guys who are paid to edit text you know those, nerdy people out there. I thought our job was gone, we will be so back.

   • Back to not so sarcastic talk, I agree to the post. I am constantly asking what the hell it means to be a developer now? Sure manage agents and their output, but we weren’t build for that were we?

9. Relaunching the instapaper API

   • Saw this coming. Was doing development on this in September-November 2025. But alas! Some procrastination habbits never change. I wanted a reader that can just help read without any distractions. Just text. And this instapaper is doing just that, wondered if I can make something like it but more robust.

Watched

• Claude Code sourcemaps leaked

  • This is dramatic and really wasn’t needed, if they had opensourced the Claude Code in the first place. Like its now open atleast once, people have reproduced it in Rust, what is the point of hiding it?

  • This is kind of idiotic from Anthropic. I don’t know what the “secret sauce” really is.

• Sapling

  • This is a cool abstraction for git CLI users. I like the prev and next for branch switching and forget for rm —cached moving the file from the staging back to unstage, really neat and intuitive to use.

  • The web is also nice, the split is really handy in the times of AI if anyone is reviewing the code and you want to have mercy for them ;)

  • But the undo feature is so great. Like that is some super power of git hidden behind some awkward commands but that interface just made it a piece of cake. Amazing stuff.

• Analysing YC batch with AI and reinventing how to plot charts

  • This is typical twitter and linkedin these days. Slopify. I hardly read posts from twitter or any social media directly these days, only if I am following him or her then only I know its an authentic post. Otherwise its a chaos to find authentic posts from the slop.

  • The video is an excellent example of that. AI is everywhere that is the conclusion.

Learnt

• JSON is worse than CSV, CSV is worse than Parquet. Parquet is the best

  • I also learned pretty quickly that the file format matters a lot. JSON is flexible, but for analysis, it is awkward because it is nested, noisy, and expensive to keep parsing over and over.

  • CSV is easier to work with because it is flat and tabular, but it is still just text, so it does not preserve types very well and gets bulky fast.

  • Parquet is the one that actually feels built for this kind of job: it is columnar, compressed, type-aware, and much faster to scan when you only care about a few fields or a few columns. For DuckDB specifically, Parquet was the best fit by far.

• Actual use case based learning for Windows Functions

  • While writing SQL queries on duckdb for analytics on the Mumbai airspace case study, I wrote some terse SQL. Like some of them very 50-100 lines long (not full lines, formatted i mean) but they were long like a train.

  • I actually understood the need and the intuition to use LAG and LEAD pretty well. Partitioning looks easy now, though I need to be very careful about what and how.

  • I used LAG for detecting breaks in a flight run. If altitude, speed, callsign, or timestamp jumped, the current row was probably the start of a new movement.

  • I used LEAD for finding the next landing, takeoff, or phase change. That is how we can measure gaps like same-aircraft turnaround time and spacing between consecutive events.

• Technical things on Mumbai Airspace case study

  • What really clicked for me was that Mumbai’s airspace is not “busy”, but the reason behind it gave a more satisifed answer. Once I took the raw ADS-B rows and turned them into actual runs, the shape became obvious: the same corridors kept showing up, the arrival side stayed in the airspace longer than the departure side, and the whole thing looked tightly constrained rather than random. I had to use sequencing logic, especially LAG() and LEAD(), to see the transitions properly. That’s what let me detect where a run was changing, where a landing really began, and how quickly the same aircraft came back out again. So the interesting part wasn’t just the totals, it was the structure behind the totals.

  • The other thing I noticed is that the mix is very concentrated. It’s not a broad spread of aircraft and airlines doing evenly distributed things. A few narrowbody types and a few major carriers do a lot of the visible work, and that makes the airport feel like a high-rotation system inside a very tight urban envelope. So the data story for me was basically: once I cleaned up the noise of telemetry, Mumbai airspace looks like a constrained operating pattern, with strong corridor reuse, quick aircraft turnover, and very clear operational pressure.

Tech News

• It was a week full of supply chain attacks, litellm then axios

  • It is somehow becoming a trend in 2026 isn’t it? Supply chain attacks on code packages?

  • Axios was the latest victim of it. We are just past the first quarter of 2026, any more to come?

    And then it was

• Anthropic DMCA run, they were dmca-ing repos they themselves have leaked. Really they have made a mess of themselves.

• Google releases Gamma 4

  • This actually looks kind of neat. I tried the smaller base model on Collab and it was somehow a good starting point. Maybe the instruct model would be better, but need to verify with the capabilities and the knowledge it has.

• Cursor launches v3

  • It still feels like an IDE though. I am not complaining, I am happy, so that means they still believe that AI can’t work without developers, people still need to look at code? Maybe, just saying and thinking out here. Because cursor feels and is an IDE which means developer needs to be hands on with the code still.

• Oracle Layoffs 30,000 employees (I didn’t find the official source

  • This is brutal. Despite being in profits, why would one firm fire off 30k employees? That is a trash decision or dishonesty.

  • I have read posts from people laid off at Oracle in this wave which were serving for more than 10 years, 16, 33 years. Like goodness! What on earth have gotten into the companies?

  • I can just wish, these people find a stable and peaceful life soon.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#788th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Phew! Another week down. This one was a great one. A lot of things are finally moving. The tech situation is kind of messed up right now, but it seems there are more problems to solve than ever. Let’s not use that word for the ending now. We can still build projects and write about them as we did before in the past before this era. We can just stay curious and still breathe, I think that what matters as humans, I guess.

That’s it from this one, see you next week!

Happy Coding :)

Week #87

It was an active week. Did quite a lot of stuff. Most of which might be wasted, but lessons learnt. Pulling datasets in GBs from the internet is not a easy task, especially if its in chunks of JSON.

I completed CS50 SQL course and created the final project linked in the created section. It was fun, learnt a lot. I had watched the full video series a few months back. But never got the full time to complete the problem sets and the project. Locked in the past weekend, and completed the full 7 problem sets.

Flight Observatory Project

I also worked on creating and making the flight observatory. Its a bit of a challenge, which I want to complete by hook or by crook. It is a dataset issue, the data is there in samples but that too is quite too much to pull off. I cannot find a easy way to grab all the data for Mumbai only region. Loading full is not feasible and cannot manage it locally. So, loading each file in memory and filtering based on positions and saving the relevant bits into compact CSV is the best I have gotten, but that is still a hard challenge to get 17k requests per day and that will be 12 per year, I want a decade of data, so that makes 17k*12*10 requests. Not a small number to deal with. Its not rate limiting but processing that much is quite time consuming. Even parallelism won’t help here.

Anyways…

Will check over the weekend if there is a possibility to pull it off quickly and cleanly.

Quote of the week

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. ”

― Elbert Hubbard

This hits home for the week. I had Codex, amp, and Gemini run for me for the flight observatory. But none of them could do a single thing without my instincts and pulling the cords. It was almost as if it can know a lot of stuff but cannot move a penny, only when steered in the right direction by the right person. Like an aeroplane in the hands of a pilot. It cannot do it properly without the steering and right guidance, the right mindset, and experience. Be extraordinary, don’t let AI limit you, let it push you.

Created

• Case Study for Mumbai Airport with ADS-B Historical Data

  • This is half baked, and made an AI-mistake that it took 900 second snapshot when the data was available for 5 seconds. Just because I told you I want the data to be quickly downloaded.

  • Have spent rather a lot of time wasted in this downloading part, I want to analyse the data, but its quite hard to pull it off.

• EPL Dataset Exploration for CS50 SQL Final Project

  • Demonstration Video

  • This was a great side quest for the final project. All done easily with a simple dataset. Downloaded the dataset of matches of EPL seasons from 1994 till 2025 and showed them to a sqlite databsae.

  • I got a great deal of info, who won the most epl titles in the past 3 decades. Which team scored most goals, and the silver lining of all was the validation query that I ran “which team never lost a game in a season”, gave the perfect answer. Arsenal, the invincibles.

• Tags and a separate RSS Feed on the blog

  • I wanted a single layer for my other places like s3g to pull my content from a reliable and non-blocking place. So this was much needed.

  • Now you can fetch tag wise, post type wise and even all content feeds.

Read

1. A eulogy for Vim

   • A really heartfelt post. I was not expecting AI, but yes, it matters.

   • Bram Moolenaar, an absolute legend, the creator of Vim. He died a couple of years back. The author of this post just wrote his heart out. Every humanly possible connection is relatable (not for me for Bram, but yes can see that). He was kind, he supported poor people in Uganda.

   • This post just gives me a hope that people can live still. AI will probably eat the world, but people like him will cease to be eaten up. And that is liberating, that is moving thought. People need to be aware what is happening in the world.

   • Vim Classic, a tribute to Bram, really great stuff. Will support if I can with any power.

2. DatabaseMaxing with Preston Thrope

   • This is a great guide. Inspirational and eye opener. I wanted to do it, year back. But still procrastinating. I had written about learning SQL, but now in the phase of building low level stuff like interpreter and compilers.

   • I am thinking of building a markdown parser like pydantic for the web. I know that is wired but it can open up a lot of possibilities.

3. Yes, I am bored of reading and listening about AI too

   • I hear you. Managers and literally everyone are somehow shoehorned into software development for asking how many tokens they are using.

   • Do they even know what a token is? Do they know wha a database engine and storage is, their difference? The difference between a row and a column storage nuances? Why? Why not ask those, instead of obsessing over the metrics. Its a wired and frustrating time to be a developer in one perspective.

   • Yeah! I know its all great and wonderful time to be a developer as well. But the bad parts just suck out the joy of it. The analogy of discussing what tool to use and how is just infuriating. Just show what you build and how, not with what and nerd sniping the markdown file specifications.

4. So where are all the ai apps?

   • Good questions and modest exploration. I don’t think the increase in productivity of building of software has any relation to packages being developed. Since the first trend that we would see is that people will make software for themselves. Solo software or personal software as many have called it, apps are just that.

   • Yes, that comparison of packages being shipped is a good point but not fully true and valid. Its kind of very early (oh, we are 3 years into AI now). But people are still figuring it out.

   • We say what just happened with LiteLLM on PyPI. That might be a nail in a coffin for shipping pacakges. Or even installing them.

5. To live in a world without AI

   • We have a flurry of posts like these. Good to see that. It gives hope that there are people who think what I fear is happening.

   • The thought from waylonwalker is truly a good callout. I hope we stay on the thinking loops rather than sitback and let clankers do the rug pull.

   • I am really startled that, this AI dystopia has already arrived and if it goes any further the world looks like a bad world from a fictional book. Phew! Turn of a year or two and bamm into a dystopia of robots.

6. Every Kubernetes concept has a story

   • A beautiful post. I was confused midway, should I laugh or learn?

   • I don’t think using a database in a container is a good idea in any situation. Unless you have a session-only requirement.

   • The pains of one thing are actually a concept in Kubernetes that is a good lesson to learn and learn each concept with a situation in mind.

7. Markdown ate the world

   • This is really intriguing, I though markdown was old than docx. But its not it was there after 2004, that is quite a recent thing. Just over two decades. And it has changed the way people write.

   • I think majority of the non-tech people still use docx and whatever doc format is for Microsoft Word. Its just works you know. And if it doesn’t work it just doesn’t work. Nothing in between. But markdown always works. Anyways, who can convince them. Microsoft has a deep foot in the minds of people.

   • With LLMs, markdown just became a standard now. Everyone knows it, its simple with just enough structure to separate it out from plain text. Just the right balance but dead simple.

8. Why I vibe in Go and not in Python and Rust

   • I can feel this might be written by AI, but still it has a valid point. Go doesn’t gets in the way. Python never does (only in prod), Rust just blocks you.

9. The machines didn’t take your craft

   • A good one, the last paragraph hits home.

     No matter what tools arrive, no matter how powerful they become, they will always remain tools. They won’t replace our reason nor values. You will still choose what is worth building. And as long you reason, nothing essential has been lost.

   • This is a good call to not abandon your craft, just because a faster method exist, never attach yourself to the tools. They will keep on changing.

10. The diminished art of coding

    • Very good. Really good. Its written from heart and humans value this. This is what I call writing. Writing not for attention, writing for connection.

      If you’ve never taken an interest in poetry, or painting, or dance, or whatever, now would be a good time. In an era where the internet is increasingly full of bots pumping their bland bot ideas into everybody’s brains, seeking out distinctly human forms of expression has become vital

    • A good point. In this era, connecting yourself with nature or art as we say is vital. Especially for developers, we need to get out of our heads sometimes, we need to ponder the blank, the boredom.

11. You are not your job

    • Gold. Just sheer empathy and gratitude for the person writing.

      • “You evaluate someone's warmth first to gauge their intent before ability”

      • “The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present. You don't extract a conversation and then disappear.”

      • “The harder version is asking yourself: if my job title disappeared tomorrow, would I still be me? Would the people who matter still love me? If the answer is yes, you’re in the right place.

        If the answer is no - if your identity is not cleanly separated from what you do for money - your relationship to yourself may need an update.

        You are not your job. You’re a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.”

    • bangers after bangers. Really, I am framing this post. Its like a healing potion. A compass for life in tough times, such as the current ones.

12. Somethings just take time

    • Yes, some things do take time, and friction is what helps it grow. Rightly said.

    • I like the idea of building communities and trust, that is what I had done without having extensive technical skills at my job, I was there just showed up daily, and … it ends wiredly but not all time ends up the right way. Maybe it was my mistake, but anyways, moving on to a new chapter.

    • I don’t know why everyone wants to churn software, what is the hurry, do you know what you want to build?

13. Ctrl + C in psql gives me the heebi-jeebies

    • This is really interesting. I like the way he calls it heebi-jeebies. It really is.

    • Like the TLS is not there for the cancel request, so your psql connection sends the unencrypted database secret in the wild, and somehow if intercepted by anyone in the same network, it can launch a Denial of Service attack.

    • The Neon Proxy and Elephant shark(the wireshark but for Postgres) have a workaround by noting the secret with the initial connection and when the psql sends it with the plain text the secret it intercepts it and kills the right session. Wired stuff but kind of no choice, that would require a bit of a refactor on the protocol.

Watched

• Concurrency Patterns in Golang

  • This was a great video explaining go routines and concurrency patterns. Loved the analogy of gophers as senders and receivers as passing the buckets in channels, the buffered and unbuffered channels as the gophers in between, really well explained.

  • Also, the patterns and concepts for those concurrent go routines and channels were well explained.

• A bad day to use python

  • Wired, how can a pypi credentials be comprimised that too for a founder and that leads to a release without the developers realising it?

  • Very weird, litellm was a great package, I like what they do, I want to make that for Golang. Never able to make one. Thankful that I was not the one with Golang yet.

• OSI and TCP Best Explanation:

  • A very enthusiastic and clear explanation of the IP Model.

  • The difference is really explained really elegantly. The confusion and the separation of layers is pitched right way, removing all the why so questions.

  • Highly recommend watching it to get a good grasp on the fundamentals of the Network Model.

• Composer 2 and Cursor Drama on Kimi

  • Damm! This is a bit sad, but not bad. Like Kimi is happy with the parternship, Cursor played around the limitation. Which is not a good thing, and can lead to other major closed source labs to follow this trend which would make open source models like a free fruit to grab.

  • Not a good spirit, but cannot say anything about it if both of them are happy.

• Kafka and RabbitMQ differences and uses

  • A good explanation of Kafka and RabbitMQ, the difference was there I didn’t knew it. They both are message brokers but one is a smart and other is a storage place with other operations to do things around it.

  • I still don’t know which one to use when, its time to really use them

Learnt

• Downloading a dataset individually from raw files is harder than downloading with S3 or R2 files with RClone

• Always match concurrency to DB capacity.

• Use buffered channels to spawn goroutines.

• Early blocking reduces wasted memory and load on DB.

• Usage of Keep-Alive header in HTTP Requests

  • TCP Connections Are Expensive. Every HTTP request over TCP (or HTTPS over TLS) starts with a 3-way handshake, SYN where client asks to open a connection, then SYN-ACK where the server acknowledges, and then ACK where the client confirms.If HTTPS, we also have a TLS handshake, exchanging keys, certificates, negotiating ciphers. Each handshake takes milliseconds, adds CPU cycles, and adds network round-trips.

  • When we add the HTTP header Connection: keep-alive the TCP connection stays open for multiple requests between client and server.

    Backend (or proxy) maintains a connection pool, reusing the same socket.

    Reducing the Latency (no repeated handshake) and the CPU overhead.

Interesting Tidbits

• https://flighty.com/airports

  • A great UI for viewing map and the traffic.

• https://github.com/ssrajadh/sentrysearch

  • Interesting idea for semantic search based on embeddings.

  • Gemini can understand the semantics of a video from its embedding model and we can search parts of videos. This is really cool, and this is where AI expands into real world use cases.

• https://translate.kagi.com/

  • This is hillarious. It translates sentence to Linkedin like voice. Amazing, whoever made it.

Tech News

• LiteLLM package compromised

  • Phew! That is a wild gun. PyPI attacks have been quite a lot in the past few years. There needs to be some layer of security with it. The ecosystem needs to improve.

• Bye Bye Sora, did anyone use it?

  • Yeah! Like who actually used it? I just saw bunch of ghibli trends and generic slop on linkedin and twooter. That’s it nothing useful.

  • Disney ended the deal, which means either it was not great, or it was too expensive for them. The former is more likely.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#787th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week, it was quite exploratory week. Learnt and built a lot of stuff without actually shipping, but that is where real learning happens I think. Lets ship full guns blazing next week.

Happy Coding :)

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It was another heavy week, a dark week. Losing grip of mind. Hopes fading. But not everything is doom and gloom; hope can be found in the darkest of times, if one finds the courage to light a candle. I crave reading books, I want to get back into it and build a writing routine again.

I am thinking of doing livestreams this weekend. Let’s see how that unfolds.

Quote of the week

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was.”

― J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

Really hitting the quote. When you actually fail or life fails you, you begin the quest to find your true self. There is a path to redemption. The only path carved by ego that leads to good and intended places. The self-identity and self-respect when it gets hurt, it bites the soul to the core, and some energy has to come to the mind to steer it in the right direction, here the energy might be negative, but the intention is always nobel. The only time you use your ego in a good place, rest all places its a waste and a waste of time and energy.

This is the time I will find myself, I think. It might come with despair and a lot of burning inside, but I can say I might not regret it later.

Created

• S3G API for querying my posts with SQLite hosted on Vercel Cloud function

  • I wanted to build a pipeline like this

    curl -s https://sqlite-static-site-generator.vercel.app/api/query \
      -d '{"sql":"SELECT title FROM posts WHERE section = ? LIMIT 5","args":["newsletter"]}' \
      -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
      | jq -r '.rows | map(.[0]) | join(", ")' \
      | xargs -I {} ~/.local/bin/llm -m gemini  "Summarize: {}"

  • Pretty cool if you ask me. Like I can get insights on my blog without getting archives and downloading stuff from different sources.

  • Just get the json > process the rows > pass it to llm and ask things.

  • Will be sharing about it over the weekend or next week.

• Flight Observatory

  • This was a random hit idea. To build a dashboard about Flight and air traffic around Mumbai. I wanted analytics for past decade or so. I wanted to know what has changed, what impact COVID had, what impact the new NMIA airport has, what the flight patterns are over the days, months and seasons, also how the monsoon affects the flights.

  • That is a big ambition, and I failed to do extensive research. I just spawned a few chatgpt threads and tried to get out of a good plan and hurried to get codex. It spilled the beans. It is live, but not what I wanted. I haven’t got metrics and the right insights in place. I am impressed by the amp than the codex, to be honest.

  • Maybe the free lower models have failed me, but whatever.

• MicroGPT fork that learns per-document representations and, for each generated token, estimates which document contributed most to that prediction using per-doc probabilities. More on that next week.

Read

• What is Agentic Engineering

  • Its kind of wired how the shift has focused from agentic to all sorts of things, in 2025 it was buzzing like crazy. Right now it has gotten better but still is bit hyped and not established. Everyone has a huge divide of opinions.

  • But the article did a good job of breaking it down and making it clear and to the point.

  • It addresses the main problem in engineers these days “Now that we have software that can write working code, what is there left for us humans to do?” Yeah, we have a lot of stuff still to do. Writing code was like taking a stroll. Honestly I think writing code by hands gives me a time to slow down my thoughts and think it through. Now that with agents, I have hundreds of thoughts spiralling and zig-zagging my brain that I can hardly do the deep work that was once possible and is possible by hand coding. I am not saying to write code by hand, but it is a therapy to a developers crazy buzzing mind.

  • This is true

    we need a term to describe unreviewed, prototype-quality LLM-generated code that distinguishes it from code that the author has brought up to a production ready standard

  • We desparately need a term for it, otherwise, people are confused with agentic coding and vibe sloping. And this article neatly does that.

• US Job Market visualizer by Andrej Karapathy

  • Wow! What a use case to explore. He is a genius. Every week, doing some novel stuff.

  • I spent 5 minutes finding where the word software was. Rolling eyes (I know)

  • It was bewildering to see that it won’t grow as much as people are thinking. Its not a sought career maybe now-a-days. The frustration of change is going to bite the newcomers like crazy.

• Agents cannot replace thinking, research and direction

  • Well noted. Really, I experienced it myself when agentically coding the flight dashboard app. I knew what I wanted roughly, but the limitations were really bugging. I threw everything in the sink that was available, and it did a good job. So yes, research is vital and so is thinking a bit.

  • Without a direction that you decide, it will definitely hold a wrong direction.

Watched

• Requestly Schema design

  • It was interesting one to see the modeling of API client. I was intruiged by the introduction, like why did he start at the variable interpolation. Is that the crux of the product. But yes the flow was good and made all click nicely.

  • However, I think there was more to it, I actually didn’t knew what LLD is. However I thought it might be a little more deeper than the schema. That was good to hear. This level of design is I think a good bridge between hands on coding and system design.

• Stripe logs differently: Canonical logging

  • Totally relatable. We used (still do, *) to do the same thing for the internal service api to log all the metrics in a single log. Whenever we have an event or a block of code or part of module triggered or respond back, we add it to that dictionary and send that full dictionary to the post request log.

  • This was great to see that we built a thing that stripe also uses.

• Its so over: Mitchel Hashimotto take on AI Agents and the grunt work by Primeagen

  • Yeah! I can see this happening. The moat for developers is to know the details and what can be right and tasteful. Experience is going to pay dividends in the AI era.

  • Its not the experience you think, its about how much you care about the details, if you already went deep into thinking and researching each api you interacted with, AI is going to make you hell of a person. If you are not, hmm, might be some skill issue. But its kind of bad that it will create a huge gap in developers.

• Are designers cooked? helll no! Stitch by Google

  • That looks slick. A good interface I must say, away from the sidebar code editor and things like firestudio and what not. This feels really good.

Learnt

• Clickhouse basic setup and analytical queries

  • I learnt clichouse a tid-bit to get a taste of what column-based databases actually feel like. There was no difference in the usage; the use case, however, is the point.

  • Its all plain SQL but the time and the way we think about data is totally different. Its meant for read-heavy and analytical operations.

• There is no free forever analytical db like duck db or clickhouse on the cloud

  • Yes, there is no. I was thinking of hosting the 5 minute cronjob with a clickhouse database that crunches the data for months or years. But nope.

  • Cockroach DB, and others have free-trial and not free-forever tiers. Such a sad state.

• API to get last 5 minute live airspace data

  • https://opensky-network.org/api/states/all

  • This was a cool find. I almost got carried away and built an API without researching what were its limitations.

  • I wanted a dataset for past decade or atleast half a decade worth of flight data. I wanted to build an analytical dashboard for BOM airport. But couldn’t find a complete one, so landed on this somehow.

Tech News

• Astral to join OpenAI

  • What is going on here? AI labs buying runtime companies and products? Like what? Don’t they have enough coding power to build it.

  • Ah! They buy the mindset and the people not the product, is it?

  • Not sure what Anthropic will be cooking with Bun and now OpenAI with Astral, but it sounds exciting to be honest.

• OpenAI releases GPT 5.4 mini and nano

  • Hmm! I must say, OpenAI is the only lab that consistently drops models weekly. Anthropic is busy with suing people, I think.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#787th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Its all suing each other, and layoff things. Quite a negative environment to be in. I wonder to escape in a cave and live a peaceful life, sigh! But you can beat the negativity if you don’t see it. That is delusional but you need to be if you want to go big.

Happy Coding :)

It was a lonely week. Trying harder then ever to survive. No work. Yeah! Hint hint. I am not at all bored and sad, but trying to gush out all the projects that I can at my disposal. I have a agent running all the time, I switch accounts if one gets exhausted with free trial, Codex(perfect yet lower models are a bit dumb), AMP (blazingly fast) and Gemini CLI (I hate it).

I am building new stuff, just trying out to be there. Its hard than ever to be a software developer. I never thought this will be it? Like I wasted my 5-7 years in learning the craft? I don’t know if it was all worth it. Seems its hanging with the mercy of the capabilities of an LLM call. Really sad times to be in.

Still hopeful, there are a lot of problems to solve yet! Humans are on the cusp of a make-or-break. World War 3 is looking imminent.

Quote of the week

“To overcome the fear of failure, have the goal worth failing for”

— Paul J. Hutsey

A goal worth failing for. Hit hard, doesn’t it? if you fail, your life was worth the effort. It might have given inspiration, a sense of hope for others to rise along with you. You might have failed, but have woken some dead people along the way, that is worth it. Its not sacrifice, its doing your part right. Its your responsibility to work for your own goals, no one is going to walk it for you. Yes, you are alone walking, but as we walk, the path appears, people come as if from thin air. Just take the step. Failure is not fatal, success is not final.

Created

• SQLite Static Site Generator (S3G): s3g.meetgor.com

  • A SQLite Shell for querying my blog posts.

  • It also has html hydration from URL > write the query > view the results > .share > paste the link and view the full post in html

  • Just a side project that I wanted to build just becuase SQLite is everywhere and can be used to do anything. Also its’s a good way to expose my content. I realise I have more than 800 posts.

• Crossposter Agent: github.com/mr-destructive/crossposter-agent

  • Just extending the fun project I had 3 years ago for the crossposter shell script.

  • Converted that to a golang service and added AI to it.

• Revamping meetgor.com site

  • Added search and yearly archives

  • Pulling link-blog from the past year and newsletters

  • Fixed some issues with tagging and ui

Read

1. AI slop terrifies me

   1. Good enough? That’s a myth, in AI world, everyone is blinded by it. There is a 3 phase thing, > let me try if ai is good > oh this is GOOD, even GREAT, but good enough > oh damm, we need a developer to fix it.

   2. This is true to vibe coding, this is vibe coding, if you generate slop, you are a vibe coder by that I mean you don’t care about the thing that solves your problem you just care that the problem was solved. I don’t want or even like a bit about being that kind of person. If I was, I won’t be here writing this post.

2. Can LLMs be computers

   1. A very, very cool post. I am intruiged that a transformer can itself run the code, or atleast become the computer, that is so powerful.

   2. The phrase is quite substantial: “The key difference is that tool use is opaque: the model hands off control and receives a black-box answer. In-model execution is transparent: every intermediate step appears in the trace, and the model never leaves its own decoding loop.” Yeah, that could really help the transformers become more capable and resilient to tool errors.

3. I am not consulting an LLM

   1. Banger.

      experience is where intellect actually gets trained

   2. Yes, LLMs don’t lie but they lie well enough, good enough.

   3. This traces back to “are you willing to explore things” or “I just want the fucking work to be done”. If you are the former, LLMs might brain rot you and you’ll be back to normal. If you are a later, you will be a LLM maximalist. There might come a time, when both of them meet.

4. Why I put my whole life into a single database

   1. Mind Boggling. Like how did he manage to capture all of that? I can’t think of a tool for each activity that I do, that would be bizzare.

   2. Maybe Apple tracks all of that? Safely of course but still that is a lot of data.

   3. I am intruigued, there is a lot of stuff to see here. I am drawing some inspriation from it.

5. Why everyone is talking about filesystems

   1. Interesting very interesting. The analogy of at protocol of social systems with agents context is really intriguing.

   2. Actually this is really correct. The filesystem is really the crux why software has evolved if you see databases and CRUD apps. Everything is a file.

   3. Skills are actually just md files, that I already said. How fascinating that just a few markdown files can change the way agents can behave. Someone just mentioned Moltbook, yeah!

   4. Also, this is relatable to me because this week I built S3G, which is basically taking all my posts and dumping them to a single json or SQLite database, which is a single file. Wow!

6. Software ate the world, now AI is eating the software

   1. Damm! This hits hard. Maybe true. But the point is change. Software is changing, the crux remains the same, to solve problems, AI address the how part, and not the why still. So, the tools with which you did your problem solving will evolve put the problems might still remain with increasing complexity.

   2. This quote is correct here fits nicely: “Computers will still be, as Steve Jobs once put it a “bicycle for the mind” - just with completely new tools that don’y need to be explicitly programmed”

   3. Ok, the last sentence had me in awe. Programming computers was never supposed to be a human job anyway, really? What about the 50 years of toil? Like you can’t call it hobby, its a field with research and lives poured in it. Cannot be wasted due to a pesky auto-complete bot.

7. What do coders do after AI?

   1. Bang my head, please. This post just made me smile.

      More than anything else, what I hope people can remember is that all of the great things that people love about technology weren't created by the money guys, or the bosses who make HR decisions — they were created by the people who actually build things.

   2. Yes, there are hard parts, but it’s put in beautiful words and respectfully so. It is a reality, and the faster we accept, the better we position ourselves in the future.

   3. The two groups that this post described, the 9to5 and the hobbyist, is intriguing, I don’t know where I fall. I am drawn by money, but I am here because of my interest in the first place. If money was not a reward, will I have been here, yes hell yes.

   4. Layoffs, that part hurts a bit. Change is the only constant, but the writer mentioned that this change is the worst he has expeirenced. What about the new joiners, new grads for whom this was the only change they witnessed. I feel for them. Its tough. But its not doom and gloom, humans have found ways in toughest of times, and the humanity shall find that kindling hope again.

Watched

• Pewdiepie’s model beat ChatGPT?

  • Whoa! That was amazing one. Bro just rickrolled Sam.

  • True signs of a grug brain developer.

  • The way he just tried and tried after failure is so inspiring, people still need motivation? This is the best video I have watched so far.

• Zero Project ideas?

  • I don’t know, that is very broad topic. I have a lot of ideas, but none of which crystalise into an actual product maybe

  • Maybe now I need to think that deeper. But building is something I loved, but LLMs seemed to have snatched that too from us.

Learnt

• In Websocket Protocol, the server doesn’t mask payload whereas the client has to.

  • Because to avoid cache-hits on the payload if the message gets interpreted by the middle servers, it might never reach the actual server.

  • Really great insight, I am using ChatGPT daily to learn and study mode for certain topics that I want to dive deep, it gives a little paragraph that I need to answer, the perfect way to engage.

• We can embed data in a URL to hydrate a webpage

  • I just built S3G and it can basically render pages just using the data in the URL as a state (title and content). This is the same thing used by excalidraw to encode data with sharable links.

  • This way we don’t have to query server for that data. Really a good piece of architecture design to remember. If the data is not sensitive you can save a round trip for the client to the server.

  • Here’s a demo: s3 sample sharable url

Tech News

• Meta hires the duo behind Moltbook

  • Wired, why that was just a slop show right?

  • Maybe the mindset of building was what got them at that place, that is not deniable but anyone could have built that, if one really needed it.

• Atlassian to cut 10% workforce in pivot to AI

  • This is coming, AI is taking and chipping in piece by piece and we don’t raise any bells yet.

• Perplexity opens waitlist for Personal Computer

  • Ok, this is just like claude cowork? Perplexity was ahead for a while, but I don’t think they have any moat anymore.

• Anthropic releases Claude with the capability to generate visuals and interactive elements

  • This is coming to every lab now. They are making it easier to learn with LLMs.

  • I don’t know why they want to shoe-horn LLMs in everything.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#786th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from a hard slogging weak, it feels like shouting in the void. Bad time passes is the slogan I hear not from anywhere, just within. Anyways, hope you are coping with AI too, if not you should.

Happy Coding :)

It was a life-changing week, for good or bad, not sure. But something is sure, I have made decisions that might change the coming months. Sometimes I get in a rut, especially since AIs have made it harder to think outside the box. Now is the right time to change gears.

I am excited. I have a wide open life, I feel like a free bird. I can flap my wings and choose the direction. I cannot be more privileged. I am taking time to learn things more as usual, but now, I think I will learn the old school way, hands-on, not agentic things and all. I need to level up.

Software is a field that demands constant adaptation, but this change is quite hard, every change is hard. We need to find a way through it, not around it. Let’s see what we have in the bag.

Quote of the week

“If you(your life) are about to take a leap, you’ll need to take 2 steps back, you do it willingly or life pulls you back”

— Meet

If you have been experiencing a setback, don’t fear or get scared or heartbroken. Get excited, life is preparing you for a leap of faith. Trust the timing of the universe, trust the direction, if you did everything right till now, consider it life’s intertwining to uplifit you, get to your destined place. I am not talking philosophically, it is science. If you want to jump, you’ll have to take two steps back, reflect and then act. You can’t jump from the current position, even if you can, you can’t move much further.

Things keep changing and it won’t be long before everything gets clear and you’d realize it was all working to make it fit together, they were puzzle pieces trying to fit.

Read

1. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to

   1. Man that is banger of a post, I just read 10% of it and was smiling and was in peace. content.

   2. There is someone who understands this pain of working with AI.

   3. I want to read this article, its too long, but I want to feel it. Weekends are for that.

2. Antidote

   1. The article has lived to its name. It truly has and is an antidote. Just read it. Read it I said.

   2. Just do things like you used to do before AI, AI is just a tool, it is not necessary to shove it all the places and situations. Be candid, be original, make stuff just because you can.

3. MicroGPT

   1. This is beautiful! I used custom list of names of Pokemon, Places and LLM Model names.

   2. This is so cool, I still don’t get it, I want to read the code, and build something different from it. So much to do, so little time.

4. You can use newline characters in URLs

   1. This is wired, I never thought about it, does that really work? I can see this being used for Base64 encoded images.

   2. Worth knowing. Better presentable HTML.

5. Is traditional software engineering dead - Naval Ravikant

   1. Nope, this is true.

      But software engineers still have two massive advantages on you. First, they think in code, so they actually know what’s going on underneath. And all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes.

      • It gives me hope.

      • Not sure because, he is not a software developer, so cannot really fathom how he can commet those all things, but good points.

6. 747 and Coding Agents

   1. Really good comparison. I feel like a pilot than an engineer now. Really good.

      Yes, the learning is becoming the most least focused thing.

   2. Finally people realise that it is happening. The change is too big of a deal, and its just shaking the grounds of software like crazy.

7. Stop using Pickle

   1. Pickle and waste?

   2. Ok I can understand the pain here. The pickle file is not readable except for that python program.

   3. By using some other standard format, it can help in reusing of data

Watched

• Peter Steinberger with OpenAI and OpenClaw

  • He just knew a lot of software, so he can do it, I am not there yet, I need to write and read a lot more code to be there.

  • This is fine, I think, as long as we can understand what the code is getting generated, I would feel nice to just let AIs do it.

• Software Engineering is dead now

  • Ah! This is bad. I didn’t realise it till wednesday. Things just hit like truck. Really sad for so many people, atleast they have 6 months, though the times are tricky, the hiring might be wired place. Its not the same, people have confusion on what actual software would mean in 1 year of time. I can hardly think what I will work with in the next month.

• Did Kellogs do the math right?

  • Nerd stuff. Really cool to see it.

  • Really, spheres can cover more surface area for filings than donut shapes, really intriguing.

Learnt

• TCP Protocol.

  • Yeah! I didn’t knew how it worked internally. I learnt that it:

    • Opens a port for listening to clients

    • Client connects to the port with 3 way handshake

      • SYN (share the client sequence number)

      • SYN-ACK (server recieves teh sequence number and sends its own sequence number)

      • ACK (client sends the server sequence number +1, indicating it recieved the servers sequence number)

    • Read from the client body

    • Write to the client

  • Its basically a protocol to communicate, it doesn’t define what to communicate with, the client can send anything. There are protocols built on top of it to do specific format request and responses like HTTP, Redis, SMTP and dozens of others.

• Tail -f

  • We can listen to file and it can automatically show the last 10 lines if there were any updates. Just wow, perfect for log analysis or monitoring

Tech News

• Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash lite

  • This is a bold claim, that a cheaper and faster model is better than 2.5 Flash. Flash was a one of a kind shattering all records model when it launched last year. I am really looking to test it out on few things. If available on free tiers.

• OpenAI releases GPT 5.4

  • Damm! OpenAI just keeps banging version bumps one after other. Every month they have something to release. Just wild.

• Apple launches Macbook Neo

  • Well! Now people would be seen with office and college laptops as Macbook Neo I guess, cheaper and premium look. Do they really care if video editing doesn’t work, probably not.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#785th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. It was a tough one to digest, but now there is no turning back, oh I have already two steps back, time for a leap of faith and change. Cannot be more excited for the coming week, for what life has in the pack.

Happy Coding :)