Techstructive Weekly #107
Reading books, enjoying the fruits of labour, he shift in work of a software development and adapting mentality with it among the other things watched and learnt in the week from 9th to 15 August 2026
Week #107
It was finally a rewarding week, after maybe a month of slog and working. I found peace or I should say the customer gave up and become friendly and found the system helpful. Either ways, it was a win.
I am finally back excited to hack on weekends. Looking to contribute to the community by writing again and building something useful. I have seen a few problems and shortcomings in this AI-native development lifecycle that I need to build them to solve them.
I didn’t read much, I am avoiding going to hacker news, its like a doom scrolling cycle. I have switched to reading ebooks instead. And for the past 2 weeks, I have read in my past time, which is just under an hour each day. Finding peace in that rather than scrolling and finding no content within.
Quote of the Week
“If you fill your face with laughter there will be no room for crying”
Yes, you can guess it, I am reading “A Fine Balance”. Its a weird but, but negative and dirty things aside, the message of the book is deep, the serenity of life and the appreciation of old times is what is so valuable from this book. Its a beautiful way to understand my parents, as they grew up in the time from 1970-90 they might understand this book better then me, but I want to understand from this. There is a bit weird mentality, we don’t understand our parents, but when seen from other’s perspective it clicks. Almost like re-conciling the facts and proving that what they told was correct. That’s what I am learning from this. It also develops a sympathy if nothing else towards them, and all my elders who grew up in grave times. Empathy for beggars and poor, desperate for food or money to sustain their life.
Read
Noema Magzine: Why is everyone in tech so sad
This is a beautiful article. It gives me a sad eye opening view on tech, or people may call it “Knowledge work”. I though that was hard to replace, it still is, but for software engineers, the grunt work of writing and managing the code is gone, so that leaves us with the most exhausting yet satisfying work left to do. Which is of course to make decisions and judgements. Being a manager.
That was the last thing I was about to do in my life, yet that is what is full of my job now. Weird times. Software engineering rewrote the way we think about software with AI.
Senko Rasic Blog: Code was never the hard part is a insult to programmers
Bro take my money for writing it. Really well written. Some points can be scrutinized over but overall a good point. Keeping hopes and the dignity of programmers afloat.
Yeah! If it was not the hard part then why would some pay handsomely over last 5 decades or even more. Yes times change, that might no longer be the only thing that programmers do anymore. But it cannot be just glossed over as “already solved”. People have spent ages on this and a next token prediction can solve it then good, but nothing is perfect.
The thing to highlight here is to “learn things adjacent to code” . That is a master advice, I will shout and shout till everyone hears it. I have experienced it myself, from being unaware of transaction certificate stuff to getting a decent understanding about the review process from 3 months of interaction with the client, is so valuable and brings upfront value to the code that I would generate or build the system. Having that knowledge is valuable than ever. Having the code understanding and this knowledge is almost like a unfair advantage over a field expert. Not everything can be outsourced but some of the knowledge and the right approach pays dividends over just one part.
The mech Programming blog: Its been a while
Yes, just sit and do it without anything on, that’s peace and sanity for some busy people.
When we are with ourselves, we observe ourselves, our own thoughts, and it helps us understand how much capable we are. I must note that too much of it can also be devastating as we say “being in my head too much”. So too much of anything is also bad.
The balance of being with people and with self is important. If done rightly life might be the best place to breathe for everyone.
Florian Herren GT’s Blog: AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
Yeah this is true. It was a vacation period where the mess happened, now its just a few hours the mess happens right? I am guilty of it too.
The code has become really harder to generate but what and why is still blank for the generator. But the mess and the expectations are not the same. People expect to work more, and get results quick. Sure they can do it, but a human mind can only comprehend certain things, it can’t switch to ultra mode like claude and produce slop like it. There are limitations on the context humans can hold and again, humans will be the bottleneck for understanding and reviewing. This makes me hopeful, I am a person who can think on problems and go deep, but when pressured, it catastrophically blinds me of my own judgements and then the delegation becomes a mess.
This is a good thought to have in the back of mind to keep yourself sharp and alert.
How chat compaction works in Pi Agent
This is interesting. I thought it might be some deterministic call. But it uses an LLM to summarize and hand-off the current conversation to other in order to make it coherent.
I now understand that claude might be using haiku or some older sonnet models to compact conversations maybe. Also cursor might do something really smart since they know the bread and butter of chat for ai agents.
Watched
Daniel Hirsch: How to live despite AI
Banger of a video. Shows how much value there is to life only when you are the person judging it.
Materialistic life and joy is not sustainable especially in this over-simulated world. You need to find peace within, if you are not happy with your own actions or thoughts, just lie around for a while do the things you did as a kid, it will bring meaning. Because as a child, no one lives for meaning, they live because they are born and they just find curiosity to know things. Don’t force yourself in doing things in certain way just because someone told something.
Casey and Dimitri on Wading through AI Episode 8: What new jobs will AI create
Yes what exactly. I like the questions more than the answers. They make me also think on what I like to see in the world.
The example of 1 vs 5 person company is so real. It divides the job we assume, but it creates a divide in who the actual winner is, you can’t say I see one video on youtube and other video on dailymotion or other service. One just is better than the other, for some use case some software might be good but it can’t be both for all. That was a worth learning perspective, AI is not going to divide or shrink the profits its just going to hammer one and leave the rest empty handed.
I thought it might create more companies, but the companies might not be big, so profit too would be meager, so its not the same equation anymore. It would be terribly different.
The Primeagen: 10% of the world computers were hacked
That was a great explanation of a great smart hack. It sounds simple but how people can be fooled is so hilarious.
Learnt
LLM Cost is something that is lacking in documentation.
This is something that I found will building agents and internal apis too. There is no official page or api that these labs provide for getting the prices for each model and its variants. There might be third party but not up-to-date for the latest models releases.
I am thinking of building a layer of api to make this standardize. Problems seen, problems needs solving. That is my hobby now.
Tech News
Its raining model weak
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That’s it from the 107th 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 :)