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.

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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 :)