Weekly #88

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.

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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 :)