Week #86
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.
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
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
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
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.
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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 :)