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Techstructive Weekly #90

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 UTC

## 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](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8414-what-i-cannot-create-i-do-not-understand) 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](https://swizec.com/blog/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?](https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/who-will-be-the-senior-engineers) - 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](https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/04/12/thoughts-on-the-bluesky-public-incident-write-up/) - 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)](https://ajitem.com/blog/iron-core-part-2-six-characters/) - 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](https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/ai-will-be-met-with-violence-and) - 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](https://www.leoniemonigatti.com/blog/ive-been-blogging-wrong.html) - 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](https://www.llamaindex.ai/blog/parsebench) - 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](https://sitebloom.ch/writing/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](https://youtu.be/y11XNXi9dgs) - 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](https://youtu.be/FqB_4QY6x6g) - 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?](https://youtu.be/zMpn9ICagdE) - 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](https://youtu.be/3DNkDIVKtK8) - 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](https://thenewstack.io/cal-com-codebase-security-ai/) - 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](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/04/build-android-apps-3x-faster-using-any-agent.html) - 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](https://www.anthropic.com/news/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](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/790) (#790th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://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 :) [Leave a comment](https://techstructively.substack.com/p/techstructive-weekly-90/comments) [Share Techstructive Weekly](https://techstructively.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share) Thanks for reading Techstructive Weekly! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Techstructive Weekly #89

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 UTC

## Week #89 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](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6503484-we-are-often-most-in-the-dark-when-we-are) 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/) → 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](https://medium.com/@lukas_kosinski/ai-and-remote-work-is-a-disaster-for-junior-software-engineers-a377b1d8ed20) - 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](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/someone-at-browserstack-is-leaking-users-email-address/) - 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](https://ben.page/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](https://www.jmduke.com/posts/software-never-had-a-soul.html) - 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](https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/06/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](https://ultrathink.art/blog/sqlite-in-production-lessons) - 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](https://youtu.be/wc8FBhQtdsA) - 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](https://youtu.be/vvhC64hQZMk) - 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](https://youtu.be/FcbsppIX0bg) - 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](https://youtu.be/fqySz1Me2pI) - 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](https://youtu.be/v9ejT8FO-7I) and [Observer](https://youtu.be/_BpmfnqjgzQ) 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](https://theobjectorientedway.com/)” 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](https://github.com/arman-bd/guppylm) - 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](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/789) (#789th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://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.

Techstructive Weekly #88

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 UTC

## 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](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/107178-when-everything-seem-to-be-going-against-you-remember-that) 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](https://dev.meetgor.com/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](https://www.meetgor.com/posts/flight-observatory-mumbai-airspace-case-study/): The [blog post](https://www.meetgor.com/posts/flight-observatory-mumbai-airspace-case-study/) and the [case study](https://dev.meetgor.com/flight-observatory/case-study/mumbai-airport/) 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](https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/) - 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](https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2026/04/resilience-in-age-of-ai.html) - 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](https://alexhwoods.com/dont-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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/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](https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/03/ai-advice-sycophantic-models-research) - 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](https://robinrendle.com/notes/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](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595) - 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](https://waylonwalker.com/ping-46/) - 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](https://blog.instapaper.com/blog/2026/03/31/relaunching-the-instaparser-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](https://youtu.be/Wvj1mTqyzsQ) - 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](https://youtu.be/7Wak2MVTsfw) - 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](https://youtu.be/OBEDESfS6H8) - 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](https://www.stepsecurity.io/blog/axios-compromised-on-npm-malicious-versions-drop-remote-access-trojan) - 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](https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-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](https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3) - 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](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/788) (#788th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://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 :)

Techstructive Weekly #87

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UTC

## 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](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/112927-one-machine-can-do-the-work-of-fifty-ordinary-men) 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](https://dev.meetgor.com/flight-observatory/case-study/mumbai/) - 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](https://youtu.be/JwxuWOYDkw4) - 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](https://www.meetgor.com/feeds/) - 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 01. [A eulogy for Vim](https://drewdevault.com/2026/03/25/2026-03-25-Forking-vim.html) - 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. 02. [DatabaseMaxing with Preston Thrope](https://pthorpe92.dev/databasemaxxing/) - 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. 03. [Yes, I am bored of reading and listening about AI too](https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/is-anybody-else-bored-of-talking-about-ai/) - 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. 04. [So where are all the ai apps?](https://www.answer.ai/posts/2026-03-12-so-where-are-all-the-ai-apps.html) - 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. 05. [To live in a world without AI](https://pype.dev/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](https://thoughts.waylonwalker.com/post/954) 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. 06. [Every Kubernetes concept has a story](https://x.com/livingdevops/status/2037430761150984475) - 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. 07. [Markdown ate the world](https://matduggan.com/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. 08. [Why I vibe in Go and not in Python and Rust](https://lifelog.my/episode/why-i-vibe-in-go-not-rust-or-python) - 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. 09. [The machines didn’t take your craft](https://www.davidabram.dev/musings/the-machine-didnt-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](https://nolanlawson.com/2026/03/22/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](https://jry.io/writing/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](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/20/some-things-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](https://neon.com/blog/ctrl-c-in-psql-gives-me-the-heebie-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](https://youtu.be/rDRa23k70CU) - 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](https://youtu.be/mx3g7XoPVNQ) - 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](https://youtu.be/3b_TAYtzuho): - 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](https://youtu.be/QGnKTRtEH50) - 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](https://youtu.be/1HOVtQ-_fcE) - 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](https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/issues/24512) - 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?](https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036532795984715896) - 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](https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/787) (#787th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join [daily.dev](http://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 :) [Leave a comment](https://techstructively.substack.com/p/techstructive-weekly-87/comments) [Subscribe now](https://techstructively.substack.com/subscribe?) [Share](https://techstructively.substack.com/p/techstructive-weekly-87?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share)

Techstructive Weekly #86

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UTC

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.
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 :)

Techstructive Weekly #85

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #85

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 :)

Techstructive Weekly #84

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #84

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)

Techstructive Weekly #83

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #83

It was a lazy week, I’ll put it straight. I don’t know what I should be doing or not doing. LLMs are crazy. I can get lost in them without realizing how much time has been spend (also cost). Same thing happened with books this week, I almost read 700 pages this week. I don’t know how, I just was lost in the books. I finished the harry potter series. I was struggling with the half blood prince on 25% last week, but I powered through it and completed both the books and here I am.

This is not a book rating newsletter but I say one thing. Reading books can change your perspective and not restricted to any one field. I think I saw a lot of inspiration for fighting against the dark arts or LLMs. No, not fighting against LLMs but sort of understanding when to let it rip through itself and when to strike. It was like Horcrux and Hallow. Not quite but something. No I am not trying to mash up anything I read to LLMs, it was just natural. I’ll leave it for another article.

But the point is, its getting lost. The art of code, its already is. We can’t write, the hard work is automated, just like that in a puff. There were people around me who always told me “Code is the last thing to care about”. But I was of the other opinion. Because writing code gave me clarity, it gave me direction, it was a validation of where I am going. But now its not quite like it. You can’t enjoy without feeling. I am an idiot here, stubborn talking about it. Next week I might be euphoric about using LLMs. No point in blabbering and hating it.

Quote of the week

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

A touch of gold that quote is. Summarizes the full series in beautiful words. Just brilliantly done. Changes the perspective of the mind, the intention and the affection. I was literally crying after reading that, I was numb after reading that quote and didn’t read for minutes. That line just moved me.

Pity for the living who live without love. What a hitting stone. Pity the LLMs, pity the people who can’t fathom the care for art. I am just dropping that quote here. I just have no words to describe what I feel. Its beyond senses. Beyond the power of words, because to feel the words you need to experience pain and life, for life is sometimes pain.

Read

Writing code is cheap now

“The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.”

- Banger, yes can agree to that. Turning that code to production grade is hell of a task. It seems so flawless that its tempting to just push it straight. But tests my god tests are like verataserum for those ai slop.

“Delivering new code has dropped in price to almost free... but delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than that.”

- Yes totally.

“These best practices are still being figured out across our industry. I’m still figuring them out myself.”

- Honestly he is the best one to put this way. Everyone thinks they know how it works, but having that probabilistic factor is very rough especially for thinking of code in a new way.
Hoard things you know how to do
- This is an interesting idea, I can think that those all things that we can do could be a test on how good or bad the models are getting. Right now there are a few things that I can do and feels a bit awkward to do, so LLMs are a good point to tuck in.
- Also the labour job of writing code is away now, no denying that. It was in the ChatGPT phase too. But now it can do at scale with the full context.
Google API Keys weren’t Secrets but then Gemini arrived
- This is funny and scary at the same time. Funny because how carelessly the single API Key exposed the full Google access, scary because how can such thing at Google scale happen.
- Kind of wired how they handled these. It felt a bit rushed and then never looked at. They wanted AI to be in the hands of everyone and everything. So I think that might be a decision somewhere that for AI studio it should be that but they mistakenly made it for all products accessible from the API Key.
This time is different
- It is always different right? In tech, no change is the same, that’s why its called change right? But people think every change as revolution, and this is like that which hits like a truck after the hype has faded out.
Google street View in 2026
- The indian region looks full of street views, shows how conjusted and cramped everything in India is. Peace is a luxury in India, though people have a unique way of finding peace in chaos.
We build a app to read books with LLMs - Merrilin
- This looks good, I want to build something like this. Recently I have been devouring books like crazy and have found myself typing 100s of queries to google (not GPT) to understand the plot deeper and certain quotes that I didn’t understand.
- Might not be a good thing to add while reading a book, but as a companion to talk to is a good direction.

Watched

Anthropic is lying to us
- I don’t want to start another week of dunking on Anthropic but this doesn’t seem to end.
- They think using their APIs is against rights, but scraping internet and training claude is not? Well they should get more of these now, let them taste their own medicine.
- I am starting to get a hatred for them now. Can’t bear them.
We used to be gamers
- This was a fun one. Really enjoyed the banter. I was also a novice gamer with my friends in teens. I used to play Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, Minecraft. Those were the times.
- Now it feels like a dread and creep, almost like wastage of life, not time even. I know, I know I am not a productive-rambling person. But it just, I don’t like playing games anymore, there are other things for me to enjoy and sip my soul in.

Learnt

Its quite a problem to now say yourself a software developer.
- The right term would be a “good software developer”. Because software has become a commodity. Models can write code and build software, but “good” is a relative term.
- The taste, the experience, the curiosity and the grit. These qualities are not in LLMs (yet). But there are others which humans can’t compete like speed, intelligence and availability.
- I don’t know who would trade of which things for humans but it looks a good trade of if someone just wants to get the foot on the market. The bar has not lowered though, the steps have. The gate is still tall to climb.

Tech News

Nano Banana 2
- This looks another bump in image generation models. I think image generation has plateaued. Except for Sora and Nano Banana, we haven’t seen any growth in the past year.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#784th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week. Hoping to get something out in the next week with code. Weekend is all packed with plans. A bit humanesque-friend gathering after almost a year, I am tired of talking with LLMs. See ya next week.

Till then keep churning tokens!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #82

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #82

A pretty heavy week. Things getting cooked up for developers. Shift in how to develop features. It feels a bit awkward that management people are teaching developers how to code now. Wired times. The craft is officially dead, long live code writing by hand.

I am sad, but not that sad. It feels like something valuable is being snatched from my hands, but something more powerful is given back, but I don’t know how to process it. Just like when our parents have mobile phone in their hands for the first time. Or we have rubiks cube in our hands. Its quite a powerful tool, LLMs. For that I don’t have a brainpower to process what it spits out, the steering and orchestrating are the skills that developer like me lack like shit and this is exactly what we are put in.

I am ready for a change. I don’t resist it, its just a wired times where all are learning how to play with them and nobody knows what and how to deal with them. They think they know if they have gotten one or two projects right, but the models are evolving at a lightning fast speed. Keeping up with all of that is a chaos.

Quote of the week

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.” ― Charlie Wardle, Understanding & Building Confidence

Great quote. And rightly so for todays developer facing the dilemma of AI threat. Do you trust your fundamental skills or AI’s next token prediction? That quote just liberated me from that question. And honestly it came naturally, I accidentally stumbled on bing search due to a link opened on my browser to it, and I clicked on home, but it redirected me to the quote of the day and it was that. Wild! But yes, we need to trust the learning that we have gained so far, the hardships, the errors and bugs we have solved so far. I sound like cringe right? But for a developer battling and grappling with these questions is in need of these words to help him understand he is not alone. Everyone is figuring things out, everyone is one that kind of branch which can collapse anytime, might not, but you have wings you know how to code, so don’t you worry. You can fly if things break you, a bird never things aeroplanes can threaten them. Do they?

Created

GCP Log Explorer TUI
- This was a long due project. Finally made the courage to throw it with full force. Its not complete but is way better than what I would have imagined, it is functional and has a ton of options. Maybe I need to think again of the UI elements and decisions, but its a good start.
- I built it with amp for the initial scafold, its quite fast it churned the full project within 10-20 minutes. Then it was broken badly, nothing was working. I handed over to codex with the tmux capture test idea and it just ripped the project apart for 1 hour and gave that project that we have right now. 0 lines of code touched by me. Mind boggling.
ClickUp TUI
- ClickUp oh dear! The time I might have waited for it to load, would have been the equal amount of time writing in the clickup space. The UI is horrifyingly slow.
- I though TUI might help, but I think I am getting proven wrong by themselves, their API seems to be slow and the UI bloat is baggage burden.

Read

Why I am not worried about AI job loss
- Humans will still be the bottleneck. I kind of agree to that. Because in the end it is humans who will perceive the tasks, they can’t have super-intelligence if none of the people who work with it are even intelligent.
- Guys, learning is going to be quite critical. The past couple of years have changed the way we perceive learning. I think we are getting into a trap of outsourcing the thinking and eventually learning to LLMs, which is looking a bad direction, and the turn needs to be as steep as possible to get back on track.

“GPT-3 has been out for six years; GPT-4 for three; and none of that has happened. Even in the outsourced customer service sector, the lowest-hanging fruit on the automation tree, we’re just not yet seeing mass layoffs due to AI. I’ll be frank in telling you that this has been a huge surprise to me. (And to others.) There is change, but it is gradual; it looks more like standard technological diffusion than a tsunami of replacement. And we should think seriously about why this has been the case.”

- This quoted paragraph gives me hope to continue learning more.

“people have responded by spending much more time coding than they used to, because the latent demand for software is so enormous.1“

- This I must say is true again.

“If we don’t need jobs, we’ll still invent them”

- Yeah! That is the spirit, that is the mindset people need to inculcate, and not panic or get lost in the existential dread. I am saying this to myself, because written words have power over vague mind conversations.
- Its going to be fine. Humans will live or die, either ways, it doesn’t even have a 0.000000001 % or 10^-100000000000000000 effect on the universe.
Building TUIs in easier now
- Banger! Banger of a post. It just blew my mind, when I asked it to test with tmux.
- Yeah! I created 2 TUIs on that day. One is complete 90%) functional and here is the link. The other one is janky, because the UI is too.
- I loved this article. It gave me a good advice to test tuis since it can understand text, tmux has options to capture text from sessions, which just open a wide variety of programmable automation and testing.
Peter Steinberger to join OpenAI
- This is huge. It also is showing the rift building up between Anthropic and OpenAI. The one taking the advantage of the mistakes of the other. And OpenAI I must say has not placed a foot wrong in 2026. Anthropic on the other hand has ruined itself with a few already.
- I take my words back for now, Anthropic was Gryffindor but it choose to be evil and should be in Slytherin. OpenAI I am not sure it is brave but so is Google. For now, OpenAI is Gryffindor for me. Brave and Generous, expensive yes but better from the competition.
Desensitized to AI Hype until tried Opus 4.5
- Yes,very well put. The gap in everything is wide. The shift of perceiving software is changed 180 degrees. There is wide gap of what code is generated and what is shipped, the knowledge of developers, the usage of models, the landscape of product, its all widening like crazy.

Watched

Opus and Codex Models
- Another banger! Sort of proving my experience too.
- I was working with amp (it uses claude models in free tier with rate limits) for creating TUI for Clickup, I asked it a feature for opening the task when supplied with a link when opening the TUI. Like clickuptui --link clickuptask-link. It was not able to load or understand the things. It added the feature but was not working. I asked it to fix it, it was not working. It just removed the feature! Like what? It just removes the problem out of the way rather than untangling it.
- Then I switched to codex and it solved the problem, slow yes but it did it.
- Amazing how each of these types of LLMs are evolving.
Anthropic is a Cult
- More and more things are getting verified it seems. Anthropic is just on a brag mode. It thinks it is a superior or a pure-blood kind of race. Really they are wired about how they perceive intelligence.
- I am annoyed by them now. They have good models, but the vibes are not feeling good.
Dario Amodei - Dwarkesh Patel Podcast
- Cringe as hell! I feel a greed and haste in earning profit and not humanity in the sight. He gave a example of curing diseases, but has he thought what is the other side of this mess? They are sort of up to something which is not quite clear.
- The idea of “country of genuises in a datacenter“ is quite ambitious and good, but is the curing of disease the only task? Is it only to replace talented humans? Replace art with slop? I don’t like that thinking of automating the intelligence part. It just gives too much knowledge without our brains having the speed and capability to handle.
The real reason Anthropic built a Compiler
- This week is dunking on Anthropic and I will do it with heart. I also thought it was “from scratch”. Well, there are quite a lot of astericks forgotten by them.
- Prime is right on the take away being, we now have agents that can coordinate for a task which can be weeks long, but Anthropic is suggesting something that causes panic and existential threat. It sound good on their words but if you just think it becomes melodrama once you see the details.

Enough Anthropic dunking, we need some other lab to step in and be a worthy crown for coding models. Deepseek V4 around the corner? Can it beat Claude for coding? Let’s see!

Learnt

Agentic usage on development
- I understood on a deeper level to work with Agents.
- Ask LLMs to ask question to you. That sounds wired but think for a moment. When you used to code by hand (back in the days you know), we developers used to ask questions and get answers by compiling the code, seeing the output, and iterating. Same is the case with LLMs, they need a opening to ask questions, they code, they run code, but where is their feedback? Letting them ask you questions gives them the context in a much better and concise way. It also forces you to think about the problem you are solving.
We can use tmux capture session to get the screen captured for debugging tuis
- This was a great leaning from the blog I read and the playing around with LLMs, it was fun and exciting to see how to intuition is still vital in dealing with LLMs for coding.

Tech News

Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro
- This is quite quick. It is better from 3 Pro but still not significant. Its also I think the first time Google has release 0.1 increase in the model, it was either 0.0 or a 0.5. Something different.
Qwen 3.5
- It is quite neck in neck with Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 in terms of benchmarks.
- Open source models are really keeping up with the closed sourced labs, I must admit there might come a time when that would have exceeded the closed source lab capability.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Meh! I don’t care about Anthropic anymore. Its just annoying now to think about them after understanding their vision.
Sam Altman and Dario refused to hold hands in AI Sumit
- This not stopping guys. That is clearly a rift, a rivalry, a gryffindor and slytherin rivalry. One taking the other. Tables turn pretty quickly.
- That was embarrasing and quite evident that dario is some wiredo. lets call him that wiredo.

That’s it from this Anthropic dunk and AI revolution week. I hope I come out strong in the coming months and weeks.

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #81

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #81

Its kind of a wired position to be a developer. People are talking about replacing or atleast questioning developers now. I am in awe, how a field that was the most harder to work in, suddenly gets bambolzed with little ghosts with token predicition machines. Just think about it, the industry that spent millions and billions in humans to solve problems is getting wiped out in months, if not weeks. I am scared!

Maybe it might just be the last year I be a software developer, might have to find other field to work in. Kind of feels tragic. People are making me even more scared. Do you know what to do as a software developer? A person who has spent half a decade in learning how to code, realises that the same thing can be generated in seconds. If there was an artist, who spent a decade in creating a painting, yet with AI does it take away his soul? No right? I also think coding is like the same, yet is the most least bothered thing. People don’t give a shit of how you solve the problem. And that hurts as a developer. It really does.

Quote of the week

Curiosity and Enthusiasm to learn cannot be diminished with any force of nature

I don’t know if this quote is true anymore. But I think, I will still cling to it. As again I don’t want to repeat it but being a developer the old way is no longer feasible or required or even admired. It is a new era of generation of code, you can’t start having attachment towards chilsed code, it can be replaced and generated in matter of seconds, with the right mind and intentions.

That’s why for those right mindset and intentions, a flickering fire of curiosity with a kindling touch of enthusiasm is a sustatinable approach. It might not be, for I don’t know what the future holds, I can just believe.

Read

Stop using Icons in data tables
1. This makes sense. Text makes it easy to view without the cognitive load and stuff. Really nice on the eyes too.
Why is the sky blue
1. Nothing tech, but a good article. I just like to read and don’t mind learning something out of the blue. And why actually is sky blue.
2. I think more content should be like this, interdisciplinary and broad topics. People need to now think about overlapping things.
I am happier writing code by hand
1. For the past 6 months, I was, but after a few couple of months, it feels like people are no longer in sympathy with that feeling.
2. There is no care for code, it was a art, well now it might be the lost art. I know it is hard for developers to accept it, but change is something we have in our blood. But man this is not change, it is just erasing the need to write code by hand. People are just managing this little agents instead of files now.
3. Everything is a prompt they write, a little nudge is what they see instead of a little read. I don’t know where this is going, but it can’t be reverted, that is for sure, the drug is real and it can’t just stop.
We mourn our craft
1. Damm, every post I read is this. We might be the last generation who remember writing coded by hand. Wow! We are that last era.
2. I don’t know to be proud of it or be scared. Its hard to see anything as a developer now. Am I just a prompt writer? Just a system person thinking about the problem or what even is the need to make products?
Heroku is finally officially dead
1. We saw in 2022 what happened and now this is the final nail in the coffin.
2. PaaS king that stayed for half a decade now, is almost dead. Flyio and Railway are the new kings.

Watched

Sam Altman and Theo on the future of code
- Its unncertain, but yes the learning problem in LLMs is qutie nasty.
- It doesn’t have a constant memory like humans, but it has a good brain, which might be mometary, but exceeds the capacity of humans. Maybe that is a wired statement, but it lacks something humans have, yet has something that humans don’t.

Creator of Clawd on the Pragmatic Engineer Podcast
- This is wild, he was always a nerd, a curious person. He has built a ton of things before many of his things have gone viral right? Maybe its not true for him.
- Its kind of crazy how he has just made so many fame out of building something really valuable, but then it feels almost like anyone could have made it, a problem first mind comes into picture.

Agentic Coding has a problem
- Yes, this is a problem I face, but I am not calling it a problem. I am not a fullstack guy yet, or atleast I don’t shift projects that radpidly.
- I am using the same things I used to use, tmux/zellij and normal editor in my workflow. I love agent in the cli, its great, but now I realise it is a token hungry thing, you don’t see on the screen how much junk or slop it generates behind the scene, when suddenly your cursor prompt says, “Quota limit reached”. Yeah I have been there.

GLM 5 is a great model
- This looks a leap in a good direction. Atleast we have a amazing open wieght model. Yes its not self-hostable, but we can use it to some very cheap price.

Learnt

I don’t know if I should learn anything anymore.

Yet, I have curiosity, but sometimes, the curiosity flame is wavered by a gust of doubt and guilt.

I still have a belief, I have a purpose. For that I will cease to die.

Tech News

Go 1.26 released
- Does it matter? Yes it might.
GLM 5 Released
- Really good to see open source models having such a neck-in-neck competition with the closed source labs. Worth voouching for.

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Techstructive Weekly #80

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #80

It was a exciting week. I went to co-working space which felt like ages. Created something meaningful with ai-assisted coding, and it worked charms. It helped get out of a dry slump and make better impact with code. Its me, in my mood, when I have the fire, nothing survives in front of me. Just that the fire is lost in the mundane dance of life, it throws you in valleys you never knew existed or had planned for.

Back to a grind of coding with LLMs. This week a lock in mode to ship 3 projects. Let’s see and what I can come up with. Maybe I’ll write an article about how my experience has been so far.

Lots of possibilities and exciting times ahead. Get out of your limited thinking, and just sit with your mind, negotiate and build good habits.

Quote of the week

Ram is the heart, Krishna is the mind

In the battle of kalyug, the heart is like ram and the mind is like Krishna. This is really beautifully put. You have the best of the previous two generations fighting against each other. One on the right path, the other on the right mindset. Both are important, none is completely outruled. You need peaceful mind, for that you need a pure heart like Ram, but people will take advantage of it, without a right mind, you cannot be at peace. You’ll have to survive the duel between the both, don’t get caught in the trap of helplessness, decide when to act and when to restrain. The person who can be both at the right time, is the winner here.

Created

The Daily Token Newspaper like blog
- I used meta-ai llm free, and some vibe coded slop to make it. I felt good. Used Gemini and Amp to make it.
- The meta-ai just stopped working the moment I created this page. I have to patch the library to make it work now.
Gemini Reverse Engineered Client
- Gemini is the only now that offers free limited chat without bot detection. At least as of 6th February 2026. It can change the moment I post something, such is the speed of shipping of people now.
Youtube Cookie session Exporter
- This is something I felt good building, atleast watching. I made it so that, I can copy a session from my un-authenticated profiles of browser and transfer it anywhere I want to browse feeds and take a different spin on it.
- I discovered that the expiry of these tokens is 6 months.

Read

I miss thinking hard
- Boy! That hits like truck. Absolutely relatable. We can share that part of our mind, it lives rent free on my mind. How to balance the builder and the thinker part of my brain.
- I also had feelings like actually typing the code gave me the time to think about it, but now the time between prolonged thinking is just squishing like thin line. Its getting too much building and no thinking or taking a step back.
- Maybe that is how we will move forward, but it doesn’t look sustainable. Developers will burn out and eventually give into AI slop. But here we are learning to deal with them at the moment, and it seems we need to find a way around and through them and not out of them.
The most important thing while working with LLMs
- This makes sense. Just like children, when you say something, they will go wild and try to interpret what you actually meant to do, they will circumvene around the instruction bt won’t quite follow your exact instruction. Its not controlling, its programming the model.
- The process of making it faster by breaking the steps into parallel is quite interesting. Not sure if everything can be done that way, we would spend so much time in thinking about how to break the problem which is half of the solving part.
My AI adoption journey by Mitchel Hashimoto
- That was a banger of a post. True and Honest.
- Chatbot interface was a good gateway drug to ai-assisted coding, but its not quite a good one, move on to agents with cli or tool access.
- Check if it can do what you can do, that is a good advice and pratical one. It gives you the taste of what can work and what cannot. I have done it myself for one of scripts to get metrics from logs, all of which I could do in half an hour, but with agents and right context, I can now do it in minutes. But that took some time to understand what to give it, and what to not.
- Keep an agent running, think about what you could be doing but can delegate. This is quite a good advice given how smart they can get given the right context and tools.
- Do the work, till the agent does its. Don’t delegate and chill. Forming skills is something still valuable as a human.

That is damn point

Well, you’re trading off: not forming skills for the tasks you’re delegating to the agent while continuing to form skills naturally in the tasks you continue to work on manually.

- Use agents.md, skills or whatever the harness can use best. Its a ongoing process but don’t get caught up for long in old ways.
- Always have an agent running (maybe just one). That is a bold advice. And this leaves me with disagreement for quite a subtle reason. It can feel like I am missing out on something if an agent is not running, seems like wasting precious time in making something, which is not a bad feeling to have, but can ruin the day.

Watched

Theo in Opus 4.5 with Skills: The best model for frontend design is...
- That was cool. I didn’t knew Gemini was that good without skills at frontend design. Need to actually try it out.
- Also its quite comical that a single md file can steer a atrocious model like opus 4.5 at design into a marvelous tasteful designer.
Theo on Codex: OpenAI just dropped their Cursor killer
- This is perfect for me, i have 5+ tabs of agents running on the terminal with cursor-agent cli. I crash the system very hard. This is really smart thinking.
- I thought of making terminal interface for the vibe coding a particular prompt into multiple models as worktrees. But this is taking into a different league.
ThePrimeagent on Moltbook failing
- Yeah! That was just a open database. Humans manipulated to make it look like llms did it. What a shame to be a human. Why do they need to make it act like agents did it, if they can’t then simply say so, and even if they can’t its not of any use.
Theo on Moltbook situation
- He was clearly hyped about it. It felt like sci-fi to me when I watched it. But the next day we say the crash, the reveal of the project.

Learnt

Skills/just markdown files can make LLMs better
- I saw this with Clawd bot or moltbot or openclaw or whatever you want to call it. The molthub or moltbook is based on just a single markdown file.
- This is just mind-boggling like reading a passage from scifi book. The transition to scifi from normal mundane human life was just a matter of a text file. Damm! That lasted for a day, but it was a good run.
Agentically using LLMs is the way to go
- I created something that increased the metrics by 15% and I was really happy, keeping the cost at bay and increasing the numbers which was like very hairy problem. That was with agentic coding.
- Love to see that how things will turn out in the future.
Cursor doesn’t count tokens used in the agent-cli in the analytics page
- I use agent-cli all the day, and I was in the bottom 10 of the organisation chart of cusor usage. I was like what the heck?
- Cursor cannot configure its analytics right, Its not just me you know. Only two people would get this line.
Sharepoint deletes links after 90 days of subscription cancellation
- Yes, this is subtle but very ridiculous from Microsoft. It makes sense, because then whats the point of the subscription if you can revive your files anytime, after years and months.

Tech News

OpenAI releases Codex agent management GUI
- This is something solid and I am looking for something similar to this from open source community.
Anthropic drops Claude 4.6
- Hhh? We were expecting Sonnet 5, but what a surprise drop from Anthropic. Did it not succeed at the evals or was it worse from the intended score?
OpenAI drops GPT 5.3
- Surprise. How can OpenAI have 0.3 versions. I have never seen 2.3, 3.3, 4.3 but a 5.3 very well, very well. Looks like the plateau of models is inevitable
Mistral releases Voxtral 2 transcribe
- Mistral struggling as always from the beginning.

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That’s it from this long, energizing week. Talking to people helps. Its not what we would do by automating, its a question is what can be automated and what should not be. AI is changing things fast and quick. Developers are at the forefront of it. Can’t be more blessed with a perfect time.

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Techstructive Weekly #79

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #79

It was a tiring lazy week, honestly. I am not not-excited. I am excited, but it feels pointless. Like swimming in a pool where people are crowded. I don’t know what I am saying but building things has never been easier and the floor is open but the barrier to reach user is still the same.

This weekend I would like to complete some unfinished things vibe coded projects and put it out. I already have completed one, there is one in progress, the last one will complete and consolidate it as my thing and put in the web. I love these times.

Quote of the week

“The bigger the goal, the bigger the hurdles, you’ll be surrounded sure, but keep the fire flickering, you might die giving a hope for someone behind”

I think this is true. I have bigger dreams, ambitions, maybe bigger responsibilities. But that doesn’t give me an excuse to give up. Time and time again, I am shattered, broken and bamboozled with problems coming out from nowhere. I still keep on the hunt, I can still see the prey, I need to move one step at a time.

I think its arguably evident that the bigger the calling (call me religious or philosophical, but I believe it) the bigger the forces to stop you from doing it. It can be a deadly weapon, every weapon is two sided. Blessing can become a curse in a flick of thought. We need to understand the core idea of the decision and then track back to our intentions.

Created (Vibe Coded/AI-Assisted Coding)

CMS Finally working with Netlify Cloud Functions + Hugo
- I finally spent time to fix my link blog setup. I made sure the weekend it was smooth, frictionless as possible, and exportable in markdown.
- The post I add on CMS gets saved to DB, the cronjob on github action picks up the saved post in the past 6 hours and adds a file in the repo.
- This builds a fresh site every six hours at https://notes-meetgor-com.vercel.app/links/ which I’ll port to my own site at meetgor.com
- It was fun, I did it like a ralph loop with Amp Code. It was fast. I use Amp code just because its fast. Not necessarily smarter, but it has some edge on Gemini CLI for sure.

I would be vibing this weekend for making some products end to end. I have been inspired by some people at my org, leading from the front. I love to be in such a place and am blessed to be here. Would like to show and prove that I too want to see success.

Read

One Year with Kagi · Blog · Eli Perkins
- This is nice, a good insight actually.
  - Don’t outsource thinking by reading the AI overview from LLMs
  - Human curated lists are often good and better for your brain than AI slop
  - Search engines already have biases in them, by putting AI they are adding a new dimension to the biasness
- Kagi is something I have installed on my phone but didn’t quite use it. I think I am getting lazy and am taken away in the habit of reading the AI overview which is one click away.
- Need to rewire it back to good old days with Kagi it seems. But there is also a counter point of searching and getting information effectively maybe that is partially true if we are outsourcing our analytical thinking in searching and skimming by reading less articles.
Some notes on starting to use Django
- I wonder if django is like unintentionally made for LLMs
- It has everything suitable for context
  - great docs
  - 2 decades of stack overflow questions
  - robust and explicit
  - not exceptionally magical
- It just makes sense, its like a mechanical part of a system, others might hide complexity or maybe too verbose
- But django just hits the harness the right I think. I have read couple of articles on this and I think it makes sense.
- Though for now I favor golang instead of django why? type system. You can add pydantic or mypy in django but out of the box support is where I am inclined towards for now.
After two years of vibecoding, I’m back to writing by hand
- True, maybe. It feels it kind of trashes the way through the solution rather than path finding to a solution
- The image is so well presented, the idea hits home.
- Though I think only certain people are able to get value out of it, its a skill issue which eventually everyone will cope with in the end.
- Not sure how well good or bad it is, it seems to be fading out now.
AI coding agents for enterprises | Mistral AI
- This is finally something I have been waiting for.
- An agent free, to run. Remote agent.
- Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, require some paid tier.
- This looks like I can finally use one from my phone.
- Jules surely is there but its so buggy and just halts for no reason, not reliable enough. Might make my own agent.
Agentic Table Merging | Tensorlake
- This looks really interesting.
- Very close to the problems that I am solving. People are trying hard on agents and this I thought was far fetched, but maybe not. Agents are the way.
- We need to find the way through agents and not out of it.
AGENTS.md outperforms skills in vercel’s agent evals
- Passive context (AGENTS.md) currently outperforms active retrieval (skills)
- Skills are still useful for vertical, action-specific workflows
- I think I can say that LLMs are bad at reliably picking tools, skills, or docs. If the information is needed, make it always present rather than calling it separately. The best results for this eval came from removing choices, and ambiguity
Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent
- Instead of requiring analysts to manually explore dozens of tables or write intricate SQL, the agent lets them ask plain-English questions and get high-quality, correct data insights in minutes instead of days.
Litestream writable VFS
- The big thing I learned is that SQLite can now pretend your database lives locally while secretly pulling just the tiny pieces it needs from object storage, on demand.
- That means apps can start instantly, even with huge databases, and only hydrate the data they want which is wild if you’re used to slow restores or heavy disks. Wow
- Instead of copying data to compute before you can do anything, you let compute skim data lazily and write back carefully. It’s a clever trick, bending old constraints without breaking SQLite’s mental model, Flyio cooks wired and quite intruiging stuff.

Watched

Laracast: I’m Done
- Laracast cut off 40% of the workforce, sad again AI in the hunt, after tailwind this is sad.
- They are producing more content but the way he thinks about code is changing.
- The important thing that hits me is Agentic Coding doesn’t drain mind. Is this true? I don’t think so. I feel like when I used to program, I thought about what to do, then plan it out, and actually writing the code would give me a buffer, a mental buffer to calm my mind from the actual cognition, it triggered a different part of my brain. But right now with agentic coding, the phase is too short, and it doens’t trigger different parts of the brain, I have to review code which I am learning to, but it feels like I am getting too much load on the thinking part without actually taking a detox from it. It might be just me but this I need to change.
- Maybe this was the next iteration of programming, no one knows, but a good thing to see people admit.
Which Programming language for AI
- I was wondering the same, but I read something like LLMs are good at typed languages. Its not quite true though it seems. Rust and C++ should be shining here, if that was the case.
- It actually depends on the ecosystem and the core principles of the language and not just the technical features of the language.

DHH: Why AI isn’t writing my code yet!
- Oh Yeah! Oh no! I thought it was LLMs don’t feel good to code, but the answer was awkward. He is previleged (earned not luck) with the luxury to be in a position where he can code with hand chisels, rest of us have to slog with LLMs to make our day job.
- Its a harsh reality, the writing code part is becoming a hobby rather than a job I think. The vibe-slop cleaner is more of a job now-a-days.
- I love problem solving but sometimes AI is too fast for me to walk, I can’t run all the time, I am not saying I am lazy, but writing was the perfect thing to spend my time thinking and tinkering, LLMs seems to take away that time and replace it with hollowness and existential threat.

Learnt

Elixir is a better programming language for LLMs to understand and reason with
- Its quite easy to read and understand, everything is immutable makes it hard to shot yourself on the foot
- C# is also a good contender, not just the language design, but more so due to community and documentation.
- I am coming to realize that having a great language is not a technical feat, but a mutual agreement between usage and depth. Like LLMs struggle with Rust too due to too verbose and cult like culture. Golang is not quite impressive as Elixir due to lack of proper documentation and tooling. Python is a sandbag, filled with good and bad examples on the internet.
Coding and Reviewing are like Writing and Reading, you need to do both
- Coding is a mechanical task, you can get away with it and feel good
- Reviewing on the other hand is not a straightforward approach, you might feel good, you might feel dejected, you may learn something, you may waste time, its quite a bag.
- You can’t keep doing one and expect things to change, you need to balance both.
- Just like reading and writing, you need to feel inspired after writing, or get your thoughts out after having a giant reading spree. Both are needed, don’t become a elitist in either of them, you can have taste in one of them, but don’t overlook the other.

Tech News

Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2.5
- The model seems good. I love the way it reads. I hate when GPTsque models give list after list. This model just reads like a breeze. But oh they have improved the coding side of it. Nice side quest.
Google DeepMind releases Genie
- This is quite a good thing from Google. They are starting to explore world models. Which could be a incremental steps after LLMs
GrokAI releases the API for Imagine
- This is a controversial feature, I don’t like the direction of Grok on that feature, it’s quite unchained and unguarded. Opposite of Anthropic, Its like a Slytherin vs Gryffindor. I am not liking when I say Anthropic is like Gryffindor but after Grok is doing I need to.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#780th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this week, it was a slow week, had a long weekend, but looking forward for a new week and a new month. A perfect month.

Happy Coding :)

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Techstructive Weekly #78

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #78

Some weeks are no for hoarding knowledge, I realize this after writing this edition. And this week is that one, the one that you need to put breaks and not reflect that’s done, but see the road ahead, not how far we have come, but where to go next. What to do next, why build something, why spent 2 years on something. Question, think, understand and let it settle. Everyone is doing that. Some aren’t privileged as I am, I am grateful for that.

I am going into the long 3 day weekend with a lot of projects to build, would be disappointing to not have at least one hack from the shed on Tuesday.

Quote of the week

“I carve things of wood because things made by effort are more real than things made by wishing.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

Oh yes! This hits. I read the book last week and completed the trilogy yesterday. The quote hits home. Why? Just compare the hand crafted, effort rich written code with AI generated code. I guess I don’t have to speak anything more. The rest is on your own right? You can express you feelings about one or the other. It just is similar, but maybe incorrect. Code is a means to an end, just like some tools in our lives are. If I am a writer, laptop or a book is a means to an end, I can’t obsess one over other. I would use either whichever is at my disposal.

Effort and wishing would come in to play when you are doing it for your or others pleasure and to express something which wishing or words couldn’t.

Read

The recurring dream of replacing developers
1. what a flashback, everything makes sense.
2. Programming is not mechanical
3. yet people tried hard to make solve for it as it was mechanical
4. COBOL made syntax readable. CASE tools eliminated typing. Visual tools eliminated syntax. AI can now generate entire functions from descriptions
5. Each advancement addressed a real friction point. Yet the fundamental challenge persists because it’s not mechanical. It’s intellectual. Software development is thinking made tangible
6. Just sheer facts those two. We need to find a way around using AI not away from it.
The joy of being a competent beginner
1. This is really well put. Very relatable. We all have started with some quick competence at something in the beginning and then ignored or abandon after some familiarity of it.
2. This exactly lists why we do that, and the reason is that going beyond that beginner competence is a steep learning curve, initially you are fast but then quickly hit a wall.
3. Most of them give up, the ones that stick, are the ones that somewhat develop a mastery or sort of craftsmanship in the art.
Welcome to Gas Town
1. Agents as code generation orchestrators. This is quite a ambitious thing. I haven’t read the full post. But I can see where it goes.
2. I haven’t either been in situations with 10s of these agents ripping in the background. There are reasons for them and some of them I am trying to overcome.
  1. I don’t have that many ideas honestly, this is flawed in my opinion, my biggest weakness maybe.
  2. I don’t have claude code as I don’t have much to spend on AI. I am limited by free options and some work related subscriptions. I am bogged down by the clumsy free models.
  3. The habit of abandoning a project after the setup is too evasive now. The earlier habit has just got more notorious with AI.
3. That all said, I love this idea, the next step in AI is agents orchestration. Maybe I am behind it, but I had a few ideas, not exactly this but some level of parallel agents running. Not orchestrating. Maybe that idea is speaking more than ever. I thought someone solved it, but nope. Need to roll up the sleeves.
The bet on juniors just got better
1. This is fair. The bet on junior aka me was that I will take the ownership. And this previous year I did. They might have gotten the payback but not quite like AI. The thing that AI might miss is reliability. Not availability.
2. If something goes wrong, I can wake up and roll in. But if some non-informed developer or AI does it, there it could get into a different rabbit hole.
3. I think the more quickly you can show your eagerness to solve problem, actual user problems the better the bet payoff would be. Its not rocket science but is easier said than done.
The challenges of soft delete
1. Nice read. I had experienced it in my first internship. This problem of dead objects. Especially if you are using Django and Postgres. It looked easy to add a field of soft deletion. But the resulting queries could create bottlenecks.
2. Since then I haven’t quite gotten the chance to explore this, this article showed me the different ways to implement the soft deletion.
The toil of blog art
1. Yes, the art of expressing some concept is valuable. AI might have eased it, but true human-eque art is impossible to replicate. The chef’s kiss is what the author is trying to meld in the post about.
Writing first tooling second
1. True, gold. This is to the point and another way of saying, “Show, don’t tell”, so “Write, don’t setup”
2. The blog is merely one possible organising principle, not a requirement.
3. I started the same way. I picked up hashnode, then moved to jekyll and github pages, then used python via markata (waylon walker’s ssg), an ssg that someone else wrote and I loved it, it was what I needed, the control of what goes in and out and also it was easy to see what was happening so that I can change and remove what I wanted.
4. I finally now am rolling my own SSG in Golang and a CMS system. I am not very consistent in sticking to one cms, I have built 3-4 versions of them. But the thing is I still post consistently. Not long form posts, but these reflective posts and short bursts of thinking.
5. Write your brain out first, then eventually it will outgrow to your needs, the system will be formed not shoved in. Like earlier I just used to write long form how-to-guides or tutorials, then I started to write reflections weekly, then link posts tils and suddenly I had 10 types of posts. Article, Tutorials, TILs, Thoughts, Link-blog, Newsletter, Notes, and what not.
Why talking to LLMs have improved my thinking
1. I like the take here. The one aspect of it only.

Writing has always done this for me. What is different is the speed

- That sentence just changed my perspective on LLMs. I was skeptical but now, since they have gotten the powers of thinking, tool calling, I think they are good at talking out ideas and forming maps of different features.
Nested code fences in Markdown
1. This is clever. Never knew this.
2. I think this clears the rule of when to escape the backticks and the fenced code block within one. Really nice to know this. Helps in writing as well as developing a SSG.

Watched

Amp Inc. Raising Agents: Episode 9
- Writing code by hand is over?
  - There will be things where you will have to write the code, but like assembly
  - it can just do things, like give me a cake
    - It doesn’t need the recipe, or hand holding of each task, it can just do it
    - Taste it even and then check if its burned or not, it has a taste or evaluation thing as well
    - It can think about things
  - You need to make the codebase ready for agentic ready
    - It needs harness for testing, good documentation, edge cases, actual problem it solves
Claude Cowork: AGI is here, hheh?
- I loved the video. It showed the flaws and the possibilities of this tool. I think its a step in the AGI, but good or bad, the people will decide.
- The edit button on twitter, that had me rolling out loud. It was a human-esque reply though. “I can see the edit button therefore I am logged in as ABC person” True. Good thinking Claude. Hope you continue in a limited set of thinking.
Claude Cowork
- Again, I was tempted to learn how different people perceive this tool. I never watched her videos. But this video came to me at random and I thought of watching it, it was fun.
- It also showed a good starting point and a legit use cases for people to curse themselves a little less with such tools.
- Developers can do it with writing scripts but laymen can’t oooohhh. This tool should just do that.
We need to talk about Ralp loops
- It kind of is hillarious of how this works! I am not able to wrap my head around it. Like why and how
- What kind of ... Writing it immediately hit me. I do the same thing that Ralph loop does with AMP code free tier.
- The context size is limited, so I have to be wary of the limit, I keep the summary of the thread once the limit is reached and continue a new thread. Wow. Writing actually makes things visible and find the hidden patterns. Gold!
- Watching this video now makes sense. It just a loop for agent to start from where it left off without bloating the context. Superb.
Its time to change your database - from Supabase to Convex

- Oh! The convex database now makes me in awe. It never clicked and all of a sudden it rings bells and whistles. The schema changes the database, that is wild.
- I can see myself using it for my favorite language. GO!
- Its statically typed, so I can catch bugs before hitting them on the database.

Learnt

We are in a time of both awe and suspicion
- I am in awe that I have a tool that can do a lot of things, on the other hand I am kind of having existential crisis on what my job might ask me?
- Like I don’t have anything to add in learning section, I am just figuring things out to learn. I guess some weeks you can’t force yourself to learn technical things, its ok and even necessary to let go of not hoarding knowledge or information (like I learn how to do x in y, etc)
- Some weeks are for converting the knowledge and connecting them to form insights and developing a intuition for the ultimate wisdom. This is that week for me it seems.
- I honestly say, I didn’t read a lot of code, atleast not something out of which I knew. I fixed bugs, yes, wrote code, maybe, but generated code, hell yes.

Tech News

ChatGPT users to have targeted Ads
- Its happening. The inevitable.
Anthropic release Claude’s New Constitution
- I want to read it, will surely read it. But I am tempted to watch theos video first. Will detail read it over the weekend. Looks something is spicy brewing in the AI mind.
Winapp from Windows for making windows application
- Kiind of wild and wired. Who makes them like that? I thought it was like a Microsoft Copilot slop for AI Agent. Thank gosh it was not that.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#779th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it from this long slow slog week. The weekend in India is long. So will be taking some time to invest in learning and building some slop from LLMs. Maybe will build a better intuition for working with LLMs, I know its not a one day process, but I have spent some months in it and continue to do so. See you next week!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #77

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #77

It was a harsh week. Not the roughest yet tiny exhilarating with new hopes. It happens, to get the best of me, things will come towards me with force. I am welcome to those challenges and hurdles.

I am in awe and inspired to build things, I went off track last week. The previous week I was pumped with two side project in a day, yet slumped then. This week would like to build that momentum back.

Quote of the week

“You need to control the mind. Thoughts will tempt, but you decide to act or let it go”

I must practise it heavily. Working remotely is tiring in a different way. Sometimes you just have no one to talk to, no one to understand your mindset. I get caught in overthinking and contemplating and procrastination. I need to divert myself to other things, its not like I don’t work. I just cannot resist AI to delegate the work and let me read more articles and watch tutorials and videos. It hard to control the mind, but I think its more important in being aware of it.

Read

Don’t Fall into the AI hype
- This is interesting and it comes at the right time

facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway. What is the social solution, then? Innovation can’t be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection. But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition, which is not always happy.

- All points and counterpoints are well addressed here. Innovation can’t be taken back, that just hits hard. Harsh reality even. AI is in the wild, you can’t avoid it, you’ll have to capture and understand them, just like pokemons. Its hard at first, but never say never. I learnt the hard way, kept giving AI things, tried different things, modes and models, and found the mindset shift. I found what I cared the most, but also a part of me felt taken away.
A typical PDF document
- This is cool, I’ve read a lot of these and working at docsumo, makes me want to read about them more.
Ideas are cheap, Execution is cheaper
- Oh, my god. This is a bitter truth. Geez.
- Never thought about it. Really its kind of true now. It just is a quick change.
- The mindset shift is critical.
A Letter for those who fired Tech Writers because of AI
- True empathy is key Liability, everything becomes liability if outsourced.
- LLMs don’t have the taste, the care feeling of the users, the developers yet.

I read a few other posts, but haven’t gotten a chance to sit on it. Will roll a blog for such link post, vibe coded yes! Ideas are cheaper, executive is cheaper now! Hell yes.

Watch

Kubernetes Zero to Hero Course: Alta3 Research
- This, is a masterpiece. I learnt everything. Like atleast touched on everything. Loved it.
- Want to get into it, need to leverage it and play with it.
- It clicks to me now, the autoscaling, security, the volume bit wow. Everything makes sense after using them and taking them for granted due to cloud run abstraction.
2026 Standup Predictions by Teej, Primeagen, Caesy, Trash
- Pure entertainment. Great insights.
- AI coded bug yep, that is happening and people won’t notice until a month, bold one.
AI Assisted Coding
- Cool advice. Need to improve on clarity, delegation and orchestration. That is a pillar in system thinking I believe.

Learnt

Cursor doesn’t count the tabs,code,diff s if not done via their UI
- Kind of frustrating to see myself down the chart for the usage in organisation. I use it heavily. Yet I am looked as AI skeptic.
- Frustrating to see their own analytics not getting into account. The acceptance is rubbish, you should not measure acceptance just measure the generation bit. No one will let the code be unused right?
Kubernetes Fundamentals
- It has three components, Kube API, scheduler and worker
- The pods and kubelet and all are confusing yet good explained with hierarchy.
- The kube api gets the manifest and delegates to the scheduler and other parts to spinup and manage resources.

Tech News

Anthropic launches Claude Cowork
- This is like a first step in laying the ground work for unemployment. Yeah really. Look at it. It can do a lot of things. Menial things that got humans paid for.
- It might create panic in industries. A good product but quite threatening and unbelievable.
- We saw it coming, but its too soon. We are in the start of 2026 and the wave hasn’t yet subsided.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#778th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

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Techstructive Weekly #76

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #76

It was a good start to the year, finally doing something that I had struggled to do for the past year or so. AI Assisted Programming. Yeah! That was something I finally somewhat understand, and can do it without feeling a slightest of grudge or emotional drama. It took a while to realize it, but here we are. 2026!

I don’t know how I feel right now. Its quite a good times to be in tech.

Quote of the week

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
— Sirius Black
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

This is true. I think we should treat people with kindness irrespective of their position. Position is no match for one’s love and care for us. They might be doing with their own purpose and needs but they still show it.

Created

World Atlas Game
- This is vibe coded in a day. Gemini CLI and Amp. Just ripped it
- I read Golang was good to work with AI Agents, thought of building some backend with it and lo behold, it did one shot it almost. For the frontend I choose Vue. Surprisingly its a great UI. I am honestly impressed. I didn’t write a single line of code, let even see.
- I always wanted to make this, but was very lazy to do all of the meddling with the boilerplatey code, it just did in a few minutes.
CMS with ssg
- Yes, this was something I have built twice or thrice, it was another shot. I wanted a blog that can just save to the sqlite db and fetch aas cronjob every 6 hours to build the site with ssg. I just gave it and it did. Its not great, it has still qwirks, but making it better over time.

Read

Dialogue between a developer and a kid
1. This is hilariously funny.
2. What a real developer is? Who knows languages? No, who knows how to code, No! A developer is someone who sticks to a problem when everyone has given up.
3. This conversation feels like me and my friend. My friend is the reason I am here today. He knew programming well. I was inspired from him, he gave me advice to learn one programming language, I was boasting about python, C and C++. I feel like a kid here. That was 7 years ago, time flies by.
Fear is not advocacy
1. This is real advice. People are hyping about the next workflow to 100x our productivity. Its ok to be 1x and still push less bugs than 100x and push 1000 bugs.
Quick and dirty print debuggin in Go
1. This is cool, we make logging a mess. For logs we need to have separate scripts to get relevant data. How much chaos it can be.
AI Did Not Take Your Agency. You Handed It Over
1. True. LLMs amplify ambguity.
2. If LLMs don’t have agency, they don’t choose constraints. Well put.
On not using Django
1. I don’t quite get it. Maybe its true. Django provided a good start but then it was like a lock in.
2. With LLMs its quite easy to generate the boilerplatey code that django provides out of the box, so that demand is lost?
3. Its not the only reason django is here right? It has extensions, best python community and even more best documentation.
4. I think it will be the best framework to build with LLMs in the future if the ecosystem continues to improve
6’7’‘ is not Random
1. This is so true

In the 1990s, a “middle-class job” was enough to buy a house. Being “6 feet” was enough to be tall.
In the 2020s, the middle has been hollowed out.
To be “wealthy” now requires a crypto-exit or a tech IPO (The Economic 6’7”).
To be “famous” requires global virality (The Social 6’7”).
To be “attractive” requires filters and surgery (The Aesthetic 6’7”).

AI should be free software
1. Yikes, this looks like a good take on LLMs being free and open weight.
2. If not, the larger AI labs might offer ads into the LLM suggestions. This, just the thought of it makes me wiggle with fear. It might push us in wired directions.
3. The point of drawing a line of “our goal” vs “model’s goal” becomes hazy and it just doesn’t align with human values.
4. Its a pretty hard problem to solve if it goes in a bad direction, which it seems to be at the moment.

I just completed reading Harry Potter #4 the Goblet of Fire. It was amazing. A good start to 2026 in reading. Hoping to complete the series in February.

Watched

Designing Data Intensive Applications: Chapter 1 and 2
- It was a great overview of the database systems. I like how he explains the p50, p90, and all metrics. It makes sense without getting into too much of details
- Also the diagram of the OLAP and OLTP databases and how it fits. It made sense.

AI codes better than me, now what?
- This is really changing. It can write code, better than me. That’s when I started to use it as a partner that knows a lot of things but gets overwhelmed and like a junior does a lot of things.
- Guiding it, reviewing it, and also understanding myself what it actually does is co critical.

Database Internals:Chapter 1
- The difference of the OLAP and OLTP database is so nice.
- Also the differnce of column based vs row based database type is clear from this. Makes sense and intuitive as well
- The Binary tree also makes sense.

The year I stopped writing code
- This is interesting and eye opening. It actually gave me the reason to be active while working with LLMs.
- Reviewing is hard, most developers avoid it, that’s the part you need to be doing, in order to be a better one. That point I had ignored and it has came to haunt me in the year throughout. This new year though, will be different. I have decided to take LLM generated code with a grain of salt.

Learnt

How to ship code with Cursor
1. I explained my euphoric moments in the week where I discovered the debug and ask mode in Cursor. It helps me to understand the problem, learn something. Which agent modes doesn’t let me.
2. I can pause and let it show me what is happening, I can read and share with it, what I think and have a conversation and not just make change all the time. The switching mode was liberating, I think these models should know when to ask and when to execute.
Read csv from Pandas in python needs quoted string for multiple commas
1. If you have n headers and have n+m commas in the row, pandas’ read csv function will break
2. Because there is ambiguity in which comma is the header separator and which is the actual text comma.
3. Use quoted string for the text if it contains comma.

Tech News

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#777th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

That’s it, a good start to the year, looking forward to a good and great year 2026, will it be slow? Probably not, but the year seemed to start slow. Looks good for now, we already have a lot of things already to unpack from the last year advancement. 2025 was pivotal for anyone in tech, 2026 onwards it looks like a year to build and carry that momentum.

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Techstructive Weekly #75

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 UTC

Week #75

Oh the middle of end of 2025, and the beginning of 2026. This is a wired post. I let myself back, reflected more. I know it was a fast paced year for software development. People are here to prove it. I just laid it out straight that its never been valuable to be a human, a distinct, natural and earnest human.

I must say I completed a non-technical goal of 2025, I have my novel’s first draft in my hands(in my google drive). Its very rough, I want to revise it, I want to remove the fluff, but it is there in its entirety. 33 Chapters, 85K words. 45 days of writing span across 6 months, I did it. I am pumped to revise and write the next novel. The hunger to write has never been higher for me.

Quote of the week

“Grit is never bad, grit with wrong intent, for wrong purpose is definitely bad”

I had a grit to write a story, I will write it. It was a grit, not a goal. I had goals for it for the past 4 years, yet when I made it a grit, here it is, I am on top of it. If a grit was something to think bad of someone, or look down on someone with grudge, it is a bad thing. A wrong grit is something born out of desires, rage, frustration, anger or even jealously, None of it could be bad per see. But if the intention of those desires, rage, jealously is for ill of someone then it could be bad, not if it is born to uplift yourself from the ground, after having thumped by life.

Sometimes, grit is something life give us, throws at you, you need to learn to handle it. It can’t be thought, it needs to experienced. You have to fail, you have to struggle. But here for me, the struggle, the resistance to write finally bent its knee against my grit (not boasting, nor arrogant). Just fierce grit born out of the desire to be a better person, to give back to a human, to say a kind thank you.

Wrote

2025 Year Review
- Feels good to write this posts. I never miss them! I write less post this year. Just 2 or 3, but I have written a lot of SQL like learning log posts (53 of those).
- Not to forger I am also writing my thoughts on the things I learn and read here. So 52 articles for each week. Easily making up 100 writing pieces.

I completed Advent of SQL with 15 posts too, here are the remaining, which I completed on the weekend. I learnt a lot, it was a good one, the problems ramping up gradually, then the lore for each post was so good.

Read

The future of software development is software developers

technical practices that can dramatically shrink delivery lead times while improving reliability and reducing the cost of change, with or without “AI”

- A banger of a post. This is expressing that AI is just a shift in a toolset, or maybe even a abstraction of the language. We will still have ambiguity that a human needs to understand in order to deliver a software.
- We can see from his experience, developers were written obsolete from time to time, and each time it was different, more potent than the other, but here we are.

On top of all that, “AI” coding assistants are really nothing like the compilers and code generators of previous cycles. The exact same prompt is very unlikely to produce the exact same computer program. And the code that gets generated is pretty much guaranteed to have issues that a real programmer will need to be able to recognise and address

- This is true too, we are just automating and generating crap faster, code is always crap until distilled and refine with each iteration to the needs. We just now have a better or worse iteration cycle, a machine that can spit out code like tirelessly, we need to vet and test it.
2025, The year in LLMs: Simon Willison Weblog
- Boy! That is a lot! I have been saying “overwhelming” word was not sufficient to describe this tend of LLMs in 2025. This explains the reason
- We had LLAMA falling, Gemini gripping, OpenAI still on the top yet cornered neck to neck suddenly with Chinese Labs and Anthropic in its own league. We saw the sudden rise and sudden dip in vibe coding, people thought “We can be programmers! We don’t need developers anymore, hehe” to “Damm! Do I need a developer to debug this?”. That was a funny thing to watch (as a developer)
- The images and 6 second video clip generated by AI are mind boggling, we saw from Sora and Nano Banana what havoc they can wreck if put in untamed hands.
- Local models are getting good, but the speed of the cloud and advancement over the other side is rocketing. There is also this trend of cli based agents. Claude code just set the trend and let 100s of cli agents rip off in the months to follow. Those are still released by new companies every now and then.
- Slop, yeah! We had less human slop than we needed AI right?
- Thanks to Simon Sir for this awesome blog. It finally gives me a relief to read so many thing have happened at a glance
Andrej Karapathy’s 2025 LLM Year in Review
- This was more of a reflection post, of how his mental model has changed and how things are building up. I like it. It was a interesting and highly technical perspective.
- His opinion of LLMs as Ghost is so liberating, as it actually threatens me from my identity if we compare it with humans. Ghost makes sense, even dismissive it as a slave sort of relation right? Not in a bad way but kind of inferior relation for LLMs with humans.
- Agent that lives in the terminal is practical, for a developer or a human who understands what they are doing, they know what they want, its just too much menial for them to spend the energy on. I agree.
- There is a lot of work to be done, developers, don’t strap your belts, hone your hammers, its going to be needed.
- Also his post:

- Could this have been more accurate! Right note to end the year.
- Vibe coding last year, now this is the trend we are surfing on, this will last decades.
Local LLMs are how nerds justify a big computer they don’t need
- Curiosity gets the better of them. I have a 8GB device, I can barely run a 1B parameter model. I get frustrated but have nothing to complain. I can use ChatGPT in temporory mode, or incognito mode if I don’t want it to attach it to the memory. I don’t see using local models on scale is justifiable just yet.
You are not dumb, you just lack the pre-requisites
- Yeah! I have started to learn SQLite and since 2 years made a Brilliant org streak. I feel good taking on advanced concepts soon.
- Basic and a good foundation helps you pivot and branch off to wide possibilities.
13 Tips for Writing a technical book
- A handy little thing to remind myself, this is inevitable for me. I would write one. Not this year probably. But I would surely write one, my gut, my instinct is not false on this.
- I would this then. Great advice for just being curious.
Shipping at inference speed
- This is a good post to say that we have different ways of using LLMs at this point and nothing is permanent. Every month or weeks, this is changing. Adopting a new workflow is like juggling circus art.
- Codex is something I haven’t even touched, Claude code too, never. I have used Amp, Gemini CLI, Warp and Cursor the most.
- I love those, those are cheap or even free, they help me understand what I was about to do wrong. They have never produced anything right 100%. I always needed to understand what was I supposed to do.
- Is this true “>The important decisions these days are language/ecosystem and dependencies” Maybe but I don’t see that. Its kind of true, but not in a big way. The major things are the flow, the edge cases and the intuition for the problem for it to be ale to understand.
- This actually surprised me”> Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.” I want to try it now. I have ton of go projects.
The internet is a net negative

We’ve maximized information and accidentally drowned wisdom

- Hits home. This is good observation and a perfect critique, not over cynical, nor too loathed. Its just helplessness to avoid the battle of the mind and the heart.
- The business of the world has forced humans itself into a trap. What an irony we live in, creating a cage for ourselves. Besides slaughtering nature into it too.

All that time, that irreplaceable human attention, fed into machines that convert consciousness into quarterly earnings.

- That hurts badly. We are loosing are attention to these machines. We need to get it back. The time, the wisdom and the boring tone to our lives.

The optimist in me is still here. Still hoping.

- This is great piece of writing. I love it. Want to write essays like this.
- Thanks for writing this Kenneth, you have inspired some spark for me.
What I learned writing Gleam, after coming from Python
- Top to down approach. This just shifts from taking the problem and boiling it down to the input and output. Wow! This just made so much sense now.
- We can define the main API as the function that takes something and returns something. In between the intermediate steps, we can then decide what each component of the result will come from.
- I need to try hard on learning functional programming this year.
Engineering is becoming bee-keeping
1. I like this comparison quite a lot. Swarming agents is what its happening. And the realisation that code was the thing that doesn’t matter, the thing that matters is did we solve the problem

Honey shows up at the end. That’s what matters.

And bees can sting. Without the right gear and practices, you get hurt. The protective suit, the smoker, the careful movements. In code, that’s patterns, documentation, tests. The guardrails that keep the stings to a minimum.

Working like this is exciting. There’s a playfulness to it. You can try things without committing. You can explore without sunk costs weighing you down. You can work on three features at once because you’re not holding all the context in your head anymore.

You cannot not lead
- This is so subtle, yet perfect. You lead by good or a bad way.
- You cannot say I was not the leader when you are the only person building and maintaining it. You lead by examples, good or bad.
- Average sucks you know? You are either good or extremely bad. You cannot not lead.
- Wow! This post is so perfect, not only fits the manager but also every human, a elder human trying to teach or lead a younger one. The younger one learns from the examples and behavior of the leader.
Git Integrations is ten years away
- This is hillariously funny. I can’t imagine VS Code team coping up with git integrations in 2025
- I don’t blame them entirely, at least they realize it is missing. With these LLM assisted coding, they decided to ship it finally. We have one instance of AI assisted coding helping VS Code ship faster (after 10 years).
- Learn Git, true. I alway 100% of the times use the cli. NO aliases, no agents, just CLI commands. git add, commit -m, push, pull, merge, rebase whatever. If I don’t know, I google it, read the ai overview and straight to the keyboards.

Watched

CMU Databse System #3 Database Storage: Files, Storage, Tuples
1. This was a good lecture on the different storage hierarchy of the storage. The top there is the pages, the blocks of memory that database fetches for individual records or tuples. Then there is the blocks of memory on the databse file itself, and the actual disk of storage.
CMU Database System #4 Memory Management and Buffer pools
1. Ok OS is not our friend, we need to manage our memory ourselves. This went wild, I thought managing memory was like shooting yourselves on the foot, but not for DBs.
2. So we load the database file, from the disk into memory not as full, but chunks called frames, where each page is contained in the buffer pool. Interesting, this is done in the actual ram or the memory not full at once.
3. So this makes it the different algorithms to decide which frames/pages to keep and evict (remove)
4. There is a difference in lock and latches, a lock is something that protect the database logical content from other transactions i.e. the data to write or avoid corrupted reading
5. However a latch is something that helps in preventing the database internals from other operations, its only for an operation not a query. Its like a mutex.
6. We can’t rely on OS, as OS doesn’t know what are we querying.
7. There are like half a dozen implementation of replacement caches like LRU, Clock, LFU, LRU-K, ARC, etc.
How I parsed billions of rows for every user in 2 seconds
1. Wow! I like these videos. I learnt a lot too. It was passive knowledge true. But I came to know that these things are at least possible.
2. Clickhouse as a database, the queries, we can use Material views which can be used as a CTE almost but on the fly, Endpoints to query them as a URL. WOW!
3. The optimisation was based on the clickhouse features only, not sure if it would have been possible without it.

Learnt

SQL Recursive CTEs
1. We can define a recursive CTE by referencing the CTE within it
2. We have a single row (could be multiple as well) as the base case
3. Then we define the recursive part, by referencing the cte as the table we are fetching the records from with the data queried to it as the parameter.
4. Used it to solve Day 14
FTS in SQLite (Full text search)
1. I learnt how to write a query for FTS and construct like a index for searching across tables.
2. This is efficient from the string comparison as we don’t have to define how to look it up, we just define what we want. The algorithm and the query planner does it efficiently for us without storing it separately on disk.
Golang might just be better than python for writing LLM generated code
1. Its simple has a type system. So it makes it easier for LLMs to generate valid code with correct checks in place.
2. I need to experiment it with to understand the nuance this has.

Tech News

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Well! That was a thumping start to the year 2026. I have bright ideas and a new canvas to paint. Looking forward to have things running and working in my favor over this year. After a slog and slump for 2 years, its time for me for redemption. I can see a hope, hopefully you can too. If not, you will soon.

Happy New Year!

Happy Coding :)

Techstructive Weekly #74

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #74

It was winding down week, 2025, ending slowly, the biggest irony. The year was full of fast-paced, unprecedented models just dropping here and there. It was hard to keep up with the progress. It was getting overwhelming, no one is used to such a level of information. I was dreading with so much power in our hands. I couldn’t handle it and refrained it and thought it was better to focus on learning new things. I kept using AI tools at work, not by choice, but initially through force but then through necessity.

People made developers go fast, but they realised,

Churning code was never the bottleneck
Solving problems and understanding the business needs was the core goal.

Yet, people thought and here we are with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and 10 other CLI tools. I learnt the hard way to leverage this tools, to use only when the code was throw away, some scripts, and getting insights from logs. But never on actual bugs and features, it was draining, lacked the joy I get from actually making it.

So, at the end of 2025, I am a decent developer who cannot use AI tools. Yes! give or take, I would love to learn more in 2026.

Quote of the week

“I don’t fear a future with AI. I fear a present without thinking.”

Yes! That is what I believe in this year. I have stopped thinking it seems. If in 2026, we move very fast without thinking, I need to change for the better. The directions we take, everything is a decision, but on what ground, on what thought. If the thought are not 90% yours, you are not thinking enough.

Think, don’t let AI do it.

Created

Advent of SQL 2025 in SQLite

Read

You’re not burning out, you’re essentially starving
- This was a good one
When you truly chase your highest potential, everything you thought was burnout will melt away. Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work. Like a boy who thought he was full until dessert arrives, you’ll suddenly find your hunger return!
Some really good points
Pause once a month to make sure you’re still on the right track. Stop once a year to triple-check you’re on the right track. But never get off this path towards your highest potential. Anything else will starve you existentially
This is true
We’re optimizing for less suffering instead of more meaning.
Yes
I woke up today so excited to get to work thinking it was Monday morning already. Instead of jumping right into it, I spent all morning making breakfast and playing with my kids, then wrote this post. When I’m writing about something personal, 1,000+ words can easily flow for me in an afternoon.
Just read the post!
Don’t become the machine
1. This is well put.
2. I kind of hate this argument.
3. Why are we comparing ourselves to machines in the first place? We can grind, but with thinking what actually we are doing.
4. Because I equate grind to consistency, it sometimes feels like grind, and we need to overcome that emotion of letting it overtake us. But most of the days, the grind is a joy, we do it because we feel like doing it.
How I left youtube
1. Man that was a good read!
2. I resonated with this a lot
  This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can’t tell your team, “I can’t take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming.” You just have to work faster.
  I respect people above and behind me, but I too needed to move in life, support the things I was responsible for, get out of the grave situation I was pushed into. For that, I took some decisions, which I tried for, but nothing came off it, I wasn’t quite sure about the switch and left it when the offer came. Stranded here. I am feeling good here, but if I am not in another company by the end of 2026, something is wrong with me.
  Let’s see!
3. Good lessons
  - Don’t say: “I tweaked the YouTube watch-time algorithm using X variable.
  ”
  - Do say: “I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer.”
  Man!!
  My final conversation with my manager was heart-wrenching. I had prepared a script, anticipating a counter-offer or a guilt trip. Instead, I was met with soft and understanding empathy.
  Yep
  The interview fatigue is real, and the conversations are hard, but the clarity you gain on your own value is worth the struggle.
4. Got to go through it once and then there would be no stop for growth.
  Grass looks green on the other side always! Damm
Text editors should be worse
1. Ok! I agree and disagree. You need to have a zen mode in your editor, which just is bare bones, and one for full fledged stuff like LSP, AI-auto-complete, syntax highlighting and what not.
2. Editor is just a tool, it can’t code on its own(in 2025, still needs prompting), similarly to use it, it needs preferences.
Structured output can create fake confidence
1. Spicy take and true! Somewhat true
2. If your task is complex to get things out from image, or understand the context, it might hinder the quality.
3. But if your task is to simply do something straightforward tool calls, structured output beats everything.
Writing HTML by hand is easier and cheaper then debugging your SSG in 2025
1. Wow! We are moving at a pace where generating html from LLM is getting easier (not cheaper yet!) than generating it by code, whew! What a time to be in.
Guide to Local LLM Models
1. Ok, the VRAM and RAM is somethign is quite critical. If you have less RAM and much VRAM, its no use, you need to have sufficient RAM in order to run a good enough model, VRAM wouldn’t handle it.
13 Years of Rust and the birth of Rue
1. I see this a lot! People creating something that they wanted but didn’t had the mental energy for.
2. I see it as draining rather. I can’t watch it write code for me, its a dreading feeling to be in for larger durations.
Vibe Coding is broring
1. It is pathetic, really. Watching it clog some code and done. Sigh what is left out then, to read code? Who loves it.
2. Vibe coding is cool and good if you just want the product in your hands, but if you care about the craft then please write it.

Watched

Bublesort is useful
1. Yes, this is kind of nuts
2. Buble sort is the lowkey high value thing to learn and know of.
3. VIsualizing any sorting algorithm really makes you understand the flow better and it clicks almost everytime.
The Fundamentals by Kelsey Hightower
1. Ahh! How many people will say this, but yet we can’t follow it
2. Everything boils down to the fundamentals, having the basic thing to understand when something goes wrong. Rather we make it complex in order to be percieved as smart and even oversmart.
Will Turso be the better SQLite? Interview with Glauber Costa
1. This was a great interview. I love the mentality.
2. If software built with community in the Linux community can sustain after almost 3 decades, then why can’t a embedded database like SQLite can?
3. Turso is Linux Community but for SQLite (minus the toxic leadership)
4. Pekka is a great, humble and smart leader to be leading the Turso, SQLite rewrite in Rust.
5. I want to contribute to SQLite, but it feels I don’t know enough everytime I touch it, also I started learning SQL for this. I have gone so far and now there is no way I am turning back.
6. I had one itch for geospatial exploration in SQLite for Mumbai city. This weekend might be the time to do it, maybe next year.

Learnt

Using Tool calling in Google Gemini API
- We can pass the tool as Code Execution block and it can essentially work as an agent in the api. This is a superpower to have.
- Can imagine people creating workflows and all sorts of things with the api in gemini, and gemini, kid you not is a really good model, like it can just do things. (Not complex things, but simple things, it can do really well)
I played with Grok Imagine
- Oh boy! These image and video models are getting really out of hands. I just uploaded my photo and boy came a introduction about me, like a one sentence greeting, but it was scary that it can do that, that quickly.
- I underistimated how quickly these models will evolve, we might plateau out eventually, but still the progress made is mind boggling.

Tech News

Well its Christmas and end of year.

God! Dam! This AI labs have learned something from last year. We don’t have groundbreaking models now! 2025 was a rollercoaster.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#775th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

But here’s my wrap in 2025

Wrote 52 articles from #23 all the way to #74
Wrote 50+ articles on SQL on #sqlog
Learnt about SQLite and solved 15 advent of sql #advent-of-sql-2025

All in all around 120 posts on my blog #blog

See you next year!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

(oh before that, there will be a 2025-yearly-review post)

Happy Coding!

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Techstructive Weekly #73

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week 73

A pretty slow and sluggish week, but some momentum carried in the end. There was a disappointment after a glimmer of excitement when gemini 3 Flash dropped for the experiments that I was running for extraction of documents. It was maybe just the timing, but after this seeing code execution from chats, it was amazing. A good end to the work week.

I have continued to write Advent of SQL for the past 4 days, and brought back the streak of writing SQLog. I was not able to ship some code over the past weekend. But this weekend, I am pumped. I have time sorted out. Would be shipping some improvements in the website. Oh! I actually added snowball and particles based on season on my website (only index and post pages).

Last weekend, I wrote 4k words in a single day in around 3 hours. I was pumped to get all in the coming week, but only managed to get 2k words in the 5 days of the week. Struggling with consistency but trying to get hang of it. I am planning to wipe the story off this weekend, a 3-4 hour session could do it. And another goal of the year completed. I can’t be more happy. A novel, first draft at the end of 2025.

Quote of the week

Revenge may serve a purpose when it corrects injustice, but it loses its meaning when it is used only to satisfy one’s ego

I was continuing to read the Harry potter series, this time the third “The prisoner of Azkaban”. I was observing Harry’s thoughts and his intentions, he wanted to take revenge, hinted by Malfoy, he found that intriguing and wanted to kill Serius Black without a reason. However, Sirius Black wanted to kill Peter with intentions of taking revenge for his betrayal of his friend’s trust. For a few moments, Harry’s intentions were wrong. But time(Lupin) corrected his perspective and he got on the right side. Revenge is a good thing if used with proper intention without attaching your ego and selfish interest. However when rage hits you, you loose the decision to take proper and fair actions. One needs to be capable of handling rage and directing it to a positive outcome, or letting it burn you, because to shine bright, you need to burn.

Read

Deliver Code you have proven to work as a software developer
1. Right on! So true. merging slop without review, even slightly running against a manual test case can give you a good confidence and make you a good engineer.
2. With more code being generated and as easy as a command, it becomes rather intimidating to review code, to accept suggestion and produce more code. But code is not a magic wand its some assumptions crumpled with logical validation, both of them contradict yet when done right, creates a software that people use and breathe.
3. I agree to the manual as well as automated testing and LLMs will follow the pattern. If you already have tests in the codebase, it will make sure the test suite is updated when it makes a new change. There are obvious and unavoidable circumstances when you’d have to check the changes with manual test, its something that comes with the plate in the software engineering role. There is no denying in this, its a fact not an opinion.
4. Software and accountability is opposite side of a coin, you can’t let software account on its own, humans have bought its existence from their imaginations and manifestation, you need to validate and prove the thing you wanted to build.
Duplicate Reports
1. Testing guys is the vibe of AI, testing code is becoming apparent as AI can produce code in matter of seconds. Learning the fundamentals has never been so vital.
The time elemet that should actually do something
1. Another div without a functionality problem. People create standards and forget to adhere. We have so many protocols, people and developers follow them, but there could be places where no one’s actually paid any attention.
2. I am surprised there is no element to depict a time for an search engine to rely on, it relies on external factors like datepublished and other in the schema, wired. Even Google doesn’t care about this tag! Pathetic.
Stop crawling my html, use the API
1. This is so funny, the API is in front of the user.. No LLM, but its so lazy to hit the API.
2. Maybe we need another protocol for how AI should scrap data from websites, but scrapping is a thing that doesn’t have a standard, or rather no one would follow it.
The strange case of engineers who dismiss AI

Programming is a task; software engineering is a role

Maybe it feels threatening to their identity, I mean, your expertise is wrapped up in being someone who can write code. Some tool threatens that? Of course you want to dismiss it.

- Wow! What a statement. Just bangers.
- I like the way of relating things, the difference in AI coding tools from 2022 and 2025 are like Internet Explorer 11 and Chrome. It really is, they are also getting faster and cheaper (maybe not but still).
- I think I bet on it, use it to ship more.

Wrote

Advent of SQL 2025 on databaseschool.com
- I am solving the problems in SQLite, I want to dig deep, learn more ways to solve one problem. Deepen the knowledge of using various constructs.
- So far I learnt about UNION, differences in INNER, LEFT and RIGHT JOINs and proper usage of CASE WHEN THEN END

Watched

Gemini 3 Flash
- Wired model. Gemini vibes. But it does something good. It is fast. Hell fast from GPT 5.2 and what was that 3 Pro, what slow lazy models those are.
Mostly Technical: Hearts and Minds
- Boy I have some thoughts here.
1. Aaron’s AI Stack > Claude Opus 4.5, Amp Code, Code Rabbit for review
2. Ship code, no one cares how its done
3. Have an idea > research > plan > throw it to AI > look at it, stare at it > ship it
4. What is the perfect abstraction, no, what can I get shipped.
5. I like to code, but I loved implementing ideas, now its easier to code with AI, it knows the patterns and abstractions. You have to eyeball the code slop it generates.
6. AI to check in AI, I was too not sure of, but lately the Seer bot from Sentry is so cool, it picks up grave stuff.
7. You need the human, flavour is the juice.
8. People can produce code, but not software, you have to have a point of view
9. I have more then ever to build, the need of software engineers is going to get more. Maybe, I don’t know. They would need a person who can steer them.
10. Its a great time to study systems, and not specific frameworks. Argh
  1. I hate to say that, but I disagree here. We need to know the tools, not specificity but still, humans are nerdy people they can’t live without doing or learning something, even if that is pointless.
  2. Learning Systems, true, I agree wholeheartedly to that. Maybe he means in the terms of content creation. People are not going to watch or read such specific guides to tech framework and tools, but broader skills than technical details.
  3. But I still think having the knowledge of specific tech or tool will give you the edge over the one slopping and producing slop when the time comes.
11. Human’s shared experience is something I am starting to consume more. Or rather consuming just that. No one likes AI slop, look at hackernews, people are reading experiences of x person using y ai tool to get things done.
12. The point of Aaron on shared experience on Pride and Prejudice written by human, is something people are still consuming and talking about after a decade or more. But what about PaLM? Do you remember the model? Noooo. We need human connection.
13. The idea train from Ian is contagious, I am running it something on my brain to think of something to make in SQL or some code.

Learnt

Google AI Studio has Code Execution ability
Difference between INNER, LEFT and RIGHT JOIN
- In INNER JOIN, the rows are include from either of the tables in a single relation only if the condition is met.
- In LEFT JOIN, the records in the first table (left) are included no matter what the condition is, even if there is no relation in the right or next tables, it would populate a NULL record for those.
- In RIGHT JOIN, the records in the last table (right) are include no matter what the condition is, even if there are no relation in the left table, it would populate a NULL record in the left table for making the right record shown in the final result set.
If you want to merge two tables, you need to use UNIONto make sure duplicates are discarded.
- Its like a set, two tables, you need the union of both the sets, and remove the duplicates.
Use count and case based increment when we need separate count from the same table.
- SELECT COUNT(CASE WHEN status = 'approved' THEN 1 END) AS approved_count, COUNT(CASE WHEN status IS NULL THEN 1 END) AS in_review_count FROM hotline_messages;
- Here, we are counting approved and in review count form the same table.

Tech News

Google Releases
- Gemini 3 Flash
  - A good jump, the preview model hmm, from the tests I have done on OCR, it struggled from teh 2.5 Flash. Maybe let’s wait to make it stable.
- Function Gemma
  - A 270 Million parameter fine-tuned model especially for function calling and following instructions
  - This looks really promising, can’t wait to build something on the phone or the cloud with it.
- T5Gemma2
  - This is a 270 M, 1B and 4B parameter with multimodal and mulitlingual capabilities, it has a long context of 128K.
  - This again stands a good balance from lightweight to intelligence ratio, highly a good candidate for making people transition into full on AI systems. I don’t know if it would lead to good or bad outcomes but a good step from Google.
Open AI release GPT Image 1.5
- Competition is harsh here, Nano-banana is so good. yet its a little behind now. I don’t know much about Nano banana Pro, but Image 1.5 might fall behind in its speed. Look at Nano banana, its zip zap image, Imagen is a slog. Not sure from the API though.
Astral launches ty, a fast Python type checker and LSP
- They are single handedly taking Python ecosystem to a spin, they are crushing it.

That’s it from this week, pretty much a good week. Things are shifting in software from writing code to testing it. Not sure what awaits for us, the software engineers.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#775th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

See you next week!

Happy Coding

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Techstructive Weekly #72

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #72

A good productive week (I am not sure, I am saying that in the last month of 2025). I would be writing a yearly review in a couple of weeks and this week might lift my spirits up. I was fresh, given time off from work, not really, but given the time to experiment.

I read a lot, fiction, technical, even philosophical, and random Hacker News articles. I read 2 books of Harry Potter. I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have watched the first 3 movies, but not books. I enjoyed it, it was subtly different from movies, I missed the quote “What an Idiot” from the movies, it was not in the book, i was disappointed but the atmospheric adventures was amazing read.

I even played with golang after a while, I streamed after ages. I felt back. I might be making much more comebacks. Have lot of ideas for projects, I know how to deal with such situations, now, do one thing. Don’t get into a trap of overthinking and porcastinating and delaying for prefection traps. Just start one project or one improvement and lets see where it leads me.

Quote of the week

“Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain”
-- Mr. Arthur Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chambers of secret (Chapter 18)

I don’t know how I picked it up. But it hit me right on. LLMs are like Tom Riddle’s diary, aren’t they? I feel so relatable here. Software developers like me are Ginny and they hallucinate us to do certain things in a certain way and we follow it, like in a trance, and it makes the software collapse. What a relatable quote. It makes me think that reading fiction is healing. For nerds like me, I would just read and escape the world.

Read

Craft Software that make people feel something
1. So good. Just do it because there is a curiosity. Inspiration is also cool and need for software to make.
  > When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software.
2. This is aspiration, the level of it is high here.
  > This is what I’m talking about: taking time to build something so that once people try it, they remember it for as long as they live.
If you’re going to vibe code, why not do it in C or even Assembly
1. Yeah! This is a valid point, If you are not caring about the code, why bother with the language.
2. Choose a language which computers can understand the best, x86 or even machine code, 1s and 0s.
3. Stephen says to create a VOPL vibe-oriented-programming-language which suits LLMs. Maybe this is what it will look it, who knows.
4. But the point is strong, if vibe coding is not caring about programming, why bother choosing tech stack and languages, just let it choose whichever it is familiar and good at just like a good’ol developer.
Why Transformers must hallucinate
1. This is a spicy take. The points are valid
  1. Averaging is a critical mistake
  2. They miss checking whether an answer exist or not
  3. Always answers will guarantee hallucination
  4. It should asses the question, then generate and not generate and then asses.
Please don’t automate science
1. Boy, it takes courage to speak this! Well spoken.
  > They are here because they love research and want to contribute to advancing human knowledge. If you take the human out of the loop, meaning that humans no longer have any role in scientific research, you’re depriving them of the activity they love and a key source of meaning in their lives. And we all want to do something meaningful. Why, I asked, do you want to take the opportunity to contribute to science away from us?
2. This hits it harder
  > Science automation is coming whether we want it or not, and we’d better get used to it. The train is coming, and we can get on it or stand in its way.
  > I think that is a remarkably cowardly argument.
  > It is up to us as a society to decide how we use the technology we develop. It’s not a train, it’s a truck, and we’d better grab the steering wheel.
3. There are bangers after bangers
  > Making human intellectual or creative work redundant is something we should avoid when we can, and we should absolutely avoid it if there are no equally meaningful new roles for humans to transition into.
4. I want to quote each and every paragraph it seems, this is so good, almost like it comes out of my mouth
  > You could further argue that working on cutting humans out of meaningful creative work such as scientific research is incredibly egoistic. You get the intellectual satisfaction of inventing new AI methods, but the next generation don’t get a chance to contribute. Why do you want to rob your children (academic and biological) of the chance to engage in the most meaningful activity in the world?
5. So true, I have been here when there was model after model releases in a week, i think in August-September. It was a wild month. I was overwhelmed, I didn’t get a chance to slow down. AI can do a lot of things, can produce a lot of things, and I cannot handle it at that pace. I need time to absorb, it makes productive, true, but it quickly overshoots the danger productive bar. The moment where you are too much productive that you lose track of every context in your head.
Software never Fails
1. It never fails. It does what it was intended to do. If the intended thing and the actual thing was different than that’s a developer problem and not the software’s. It did what was written as its not a magic wand that will do what you thought to do.
I read more than I write, do you?
1. Yes, this is true for me too. Reading needs to be more or rather at certain point, balanced from writing.
2. You can’t just keep on reading and produce nothing. You will have to reflect on what you have consumed. This newsletter is exactly that.
  1. After I got a full time job, I suddenly had a lot of time, I realized i needed to dump my learning somewhere and I was following by and quickly felt the urge to log my reading and interesting things I find throughout the week. There were a lot of things, I took for granted, they got lost and most of the things didn’t stick. I started this and it helped me realize the ample amount of time I have to learn, explore and tinker on stuff. It was liberating. Hence writing the 72nd edition of this. Its fun.
Vibe Coding is made and depressing
1. Sigh, The frustration is quite evident
  > I just feel sad with how AI has bastardized my profession, which I worked hard for the last 15 years. There is no best practices anymore, no proper process, no meaningful back and forth
2. I can even feel it with 5 years of coding, man has been doing it for 15 years! Humans gets too excited when they can produce code i think.
The Gemini API Key Frustration
1. Yeah! have you set up Google products without opening and closing a bunch of tabs
2. Here you are in 2025. Wait a minute, was PaLM a thing? wasn’t google notes to be shut down?
3. What is happening, what is AI Studio, Vertex AI, Jules, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Gemini models of course, dug sneaked into various products, geese. Google!
A TSP game I wanted for 10 years: built in 4 hours
1. This is quite a good thing, I am not good at frontend, i let ai do it, i do what i am good at, writing backend. Really? need to see it carefully again.
Growing Software
1. What a great analogy. Software is not architect a building but its growing a garden. You don’t have a layout already built, some parts are clear not all. Software is ever changing. You need to build something, observe and change constantly just like a gardener. Gardener doesn’t plant a bunch of plants and forgets, but rather it nurtures them, observes and then takes care of them.
2. Software is not something you build, its something you grow. Its a slow process.
How HTML changes in EPUB
1. This is quite intuitive. I didn’t knew epub is a collection of XHTML documents. Its quite obvious now.
2. Because e-book has to be scaled from each character, so it is xhtml or some variant of it. Zooming, Changing fonts, all happens at all levels or doesn’t look good. So that is the perfect use case for it.

Created

SQLog: Create Strict Tables
Live streaming Advent of Code Day 1 and 2 in Golang
YouTube Shorts on FreeCodeCamp Daily Challenges

Watched

Software is getting worse
- Yes, This is true, from I have not observed actively, but looks valid and intuitive
  - We need these three ingredients for a good software
    - Passion
    - Trying to solve a problem with care
    - Developers been funded or are self sustainable

As the software gets old it get big
As the software gets big, it gets worse

These are not the things responsible for bad software (might be but not only)
- AI Slop
- Not using Rust (or any other framework or language)
- It’s an Electron app (or using a particular framework or language)
STRING is actually an integer type
- Everything is flexible unless you type strict
- SQLite is flexible, as I have said its a double-edged sword until you don’t want it to be.
Just use Postgres
- Wow! I love this. I want to write a technical book too. It is such a great adventure to be in. But burnout seems to be stronger there.
- I love Postgres can be used as a message queue, gen ai application, full text search I knew and JSON was obvious.
- Getting deep into the tech is important, I need to focus on thing at a time.

Learnt

Using Strict mode in table creation in SQLite.
- If you enable strict option while creating a table, you need to specify either of the 4 types (int, text, blob, any), Don’t use any, it defeats the purpose of using strict option.
- You will lose the flexibility entirely when you type strict, can’t even ignore the type before a column while creating the table.
Code generation is getting cheaper
- Look around, there are 10s of agentic CLIs and what not, everyone is commoditizing the AI tokens, its getting cheaper too. The speed at which it generates stuff (not quality, quantity) matters in code, if you know what you are doing, then you can ster it quickly to get results quick. I have learnt it the hard way, by vibing hard and after 4 years of hard work. It finaly feels I can understand the productive side of AI coding.

Tech News

OpenAI Launches GPT-5.2
- Everyone says it will be a best model for a while, and then silence. It just amalgamates into the slop. Nothing major I can see, 0.01% maybe.
Google Rolls Out Reimagined Gemini Deep Research
- This is something cool, but deep research is neither deep nor its a research, its just summarising the links into a hallucinated piece of document.
Agentic AI Foundation Launched Under Linux Foundation
- Wow! Anthropic in opensource, who would have thought.
- Anthropic donated MCP, OpenAI with Agents.md (I am actually confused, what is a agent and file name belonging to a company, why they own it?), Goose from Block.

That’s it from the week. I am excited to code more in parallel, by spawning the agents in the background and reviewing the code. Yes, I no more write code by hand. I like to when I do, but as a software developer and employee, I don’t write code as I used to a year back. I spawn code agents and heavily review its output. Embrace the way it is, adapt the skills, there’s no other way.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#774th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

See you next week!

Happy Coding

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Techstructive Weekly #71

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #71

It was a roller-coaster week. Half of the week, it was travelling and outside. The rest was coping with AI news and code agents. Getting back to work after a week is a bit stressful and brings a bit of hurdle of health. I wasn’t quite well for a couple of days after the trip, and couldn’t really work at my 100% best. So, this weekend I would be pacing up, slowing down when needed to rest with ease. I have a few plans for Advent of Code, I haven’ gotten the time to solve even the first problem, looking forward to the weekend to keeping up with it.

On the AI side, there were a lot of releases and news all over the place. Anthropic with a wired deal, OpenAI with its red alert, Mistral with a new family of models, and Deepseek with frontier model releases. The tech is moving faster then ever, and I am finding it really overwhelming, its hard to keep up with the models.

Quote of the week

“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What’s hard is not the work itself, but the belief that we are worthy of doing it.”
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

I’ll leave it here. I have wrote almost consistently for 30 days. 1000+ words each day. Crossing even 2k mark on couple of days. I am also on a 71 week streak on this newsletter. I write consistently, it’s not hard to write, its just hard to sit and start. The rest is flow, the rest is not art, it’s intuition and the muscle that develops over time. Real art is fighting the initial hurdle, the resistance to begin is hardest, the rest is smooth ride, once one is immersed.

Read

On 10 years of writing a blog that nobody reads
- Interesting take on writing in the age of AI, relating to breathe, inhale -> read, exhale -> review and reflect
All it takes is for one to work out
- Yes, this is true. For it to happen though you might have to attempt 99 shots, good or bad, doesn’t matter, that’s what the journey is about. Figuring and Learning things through action.

Watched

Google’s Nano Banana Pro Image Generation Model
- He is saying he won’t use Adobe Photoshop anymore, my god. This models are getting into our heads. Art is at stake, or is it.
- The SynthID is not quite a solution, just a label from Google or a tag to show that they care about safety but they don’t know how to.
- The quality of these images is so crisp, OpenAI models have some edgy and fainted colors, but Google’s models are so vibrant.
Anthropic acquires Bun
- Yes, this is a wired deal. No one really knows what is happening and what they are going to do. Bun was a good step. The decision to merge into Anthropic might be good as they are now paid to do their work.
- Sustainability is solved, but what if they are no longer the owner of the product or the tool? What about the future of it? We have seen open source project falter under big companies.
Anthropic confirms software engineering is not dead
- Six months are over, we are in 2026 almost, are there developers still around. I don’t think so, yesterday I heard someone yell at a computer and bang its keys to prompt another fix. We are safe for now.
Code Optimisation via Memoization
- Such a great explanation. Drawing helps so much in computer science. Being able to visualize how each number is computed, it gives a lot of insight into what the pattern is being repeated and carve out the commonality in the pattern.

Learnt

Grabbing Slack token for custom scripts
- If you wanted to scrap data from an alert channel in slack, then you have to go to the web platform and perform a certain operations for authenticating the api from the script.
- Any conversation like api request in the network tab, can fetch you the token in the payload, usually beginning with xoxc-. Store it and then you can request any messages from any channel or chat. Simple.
Google Sheets Count formula
- Use COUNTA with the parameters as the range of rows to get the number of rows in the provided range.
- Use COUNTA(UNIQUE()) with the parameters as the range of rows to get the unique rows in the provided range.

Tech News

Bun is acquired by Anthropic
- Wait what? How? Why? Such a wired deal. One of the unorthodox deal I have seen in tech, one is a runtime or toolchain in javascript, the other is a AI lab.
OpenAI marks ‘Code Red’ amidst escalating competition from Google and Anthropic and open models from China
Django 6.0 released
Mistral 3 family of models released
Ghostty is now non-profit

I want to watch this video. It just intrigued me, I have been a django developer till late 2023. But then, AI came in and here I am. I haven’t touched Django development since then. I want to see why it might be the case, I suspect its due to ai automating the boilerplate code? Maybe the repetitive and boilerplatey code is no more a cognition on the developers, AI is doing it with flask for them. Not sure. Watch it to find out.

That’s it from this week. I have been out of sync in tech for a while. Need to get hands on and create a few project, the itch is there, just procrastination is holding me back. Let’s see if this year I can complete Advent of Code, in Golang of course, need to learn tests, more concurrent operations and stuff.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#773rd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #70

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #70

As I wrote last week, I would be travelling and out on a break due to weddings at my contry side place, cousins wedding, som heavy travelling no tech access for most of the time. However I had atleast 4 days of work covered so I have few tidbits to share. Weekends, three days of the week and taking leave on evening on wednesday.

I played around with vllms , new different models for different thins ranging from ad hock coding tasks, proper code editing, and document extraction usecases. Didn’t find time to read or watch much.

Not adding quote of the week, didn't get a time to read or find quotes or do much to find relevant quotes either.

Read

How i overcame inertia with a weekend project

This is eye opning. You need some inertia to get up and running. Once you are in motion, its hard to stop. You write one word, you think about the next word and it makes a paragraph.
This is true that more we think about doing things, the more wemove out from the action. It creates a vicious cycle of overthinking and inaction.
Move out of thinking, start doing stuff it will make things moving and create a flow that is hard to stop.

Shuffle: Making random feel more human
1. This is a bit under-technical thing. I didn’t get a good flow of the algorithm. i want to understand with an example.
Rabbit hole learning
1. This is a good idea, but it kind of breaks the cycle kf a rabbit hole to log everything that we did and learnt.
2. It removes the core advantage of learning things by diging deep.

Watched

How flask started as a joke
- That is not a joke, but rather a serious problem solved as a side quest and thought of just shipping things. You never know what could work and what won’t.
The Godmother of AI
- This is so cool,
- What is the difference of AI and AGi. Think about it. AI was to humans, as AGI is to AI both are same things just the level of buzz in some of the terms is just hype.
- Make humans better, making it answer things possible.
Anthropic with Opus 4.5
- That’s a minor bump maybe, its different in subtle ways. Still has its pinkish purple vibes.
- The snitch bench is cool, it looked something cooler, not much out of the wild. But different from the typical mode vibes.
You’re all wrong
- Yeah, been there done that. Twch stack and programming languages are not one fit all shape. It depends. The typical reason in tech.

It was a quick week, I am writing this out in a hurry, I didn’t have much time yesterday to curate things, but randomly scrimped through the history to find te bits I found most interesting.

Next will also would be slow, I would have to keep up at work and work up the way to get things running again. Its a hustle after a wee worth break.

Techstructive Weekly #69

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #69

It was a good week. That’s what I can say. I continued writing. I experimented with quite a lot of things. VLLMs, new models, new approaches, tactics, and read a lot of articles as usual.

As I was in the GCP Cloud Log Explorer TUI in the bubbletea golang app, I vibe-coded it, I wanted to feel it. No, I am not using that to publish on GitHub. I would make one from bare hands, what to put in the model, on the screen, when to update what, which keybindings to add where, I will think about each of them and code from scratch. My goal is to learn and build, not just build.

I wrote for the whole week, 21 days in the streak, and feeling good and motivated to complete the month on a high note, the project isn’t complete, but it put it on the right stage for me to complete it.

Quote of the week

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
— Jodi Picoul

I’ll go with this one. I have written for the past 20 days, and I can surely say I am a bad first drafter. I have no story, just an idea of a scene or a plot for an entire story. I am lost in the start. I still put pen to paper, wrote ~1000 words daily, and here I have some things to move the story, from point A to B.

Another quote might be

“As you start to walk the way appears”
— Rumi

I had one idea, but the start was blank. I still wrote some garbage. It was enough to help me break the barrier and helped in thinking out. After writing so much shit, not slop, I have a good understanding of what works and what the issues are. As the first quote goes, you can’t edit an empty page. There is no story to edit, there are no flaws to fix, no plotholes to patch, what is that for? You have to fail, understand the missing points, connect the dots, and move forward.

Read

A project is not a bundle ot tasks
- This is one of the best and practically grounded takes on the progress on AI. If it can’t make a decision that lasts longer, it might collapse eventually. AI Coding has improved over the last year for sure, but is it there? Not really. A developer still has to understand the logic, think about the AI answers, there has to be a human intuition and judgement to make its way to a sustainable solution.
- As per the growth, developers might be overgrown by 2030, is that really that quick? Maybe the plateau is almost here. It can code, sure, but it doesn’t create anything. It can create something like they are created by humans, not something out of the blue.
Alien Authors
- Wow, this is just wow. The analogy of writers managing a bunch of written text from AI to create their own story is quite relatable to a developer managing a bunch of parallel agents to generate code and design a feature or come up with a solution.
- The whole story was really cleverly put and relatable. Though I would argue it’s quite a bad one for making one artist happy. I never want an artist to generate art with AI and tweak and tweak to please someone. Art is something that comes fully from the heart, otherwise, it’s not art. It’s pseudo art, artificial art, forced art.
Why Software Development fell to AI first
- It makes sense now,
  - It is instantly verifiable> if you can run it, it has some potential
  - The medium is the message > Text in > text out
  - There is verification, and it can check itself > if there are tests, it can run, it can itself verify if the generated code works or not, and tweak accordingly
- These are compelling enough reasons to understand that software is quite suited for AI to bite its jaws from.
The 18th November 2025 Cloudflare Outage Report
- Ok, that was quite a big outage. It was the biggest Cloudflare outage since 2019. Four hours. It was down, everything was down. It got a few eyes on the engineering debt.
- I wonder if Cloudflare was really required in their tech stack who were affected in this outage. Really? I don’t think so, just for reverse-proxy, verification, 10 users, do you need Cloudflare? No, dog, you don’t.
- This is what is rightly pointed out here. It was a good thing, it put eyes on things which we take for granted or overlook, and just use the defaults, the frictionless tools.
How bcrypt can be unsafe for more than 72 characters
- Oh, that is wired, use Argon guys, if you aren’t just storing passwords.
- Nice to know that bcrypt is not safe for passwords greater than 72 characters, who would even store such a long password?
- But that is the thing, subtle decisions, like this is not a password, so we can use bcrypt, and bam, you would be wrong
Fizzbuzz without conditions or booleans
- A nice pattern like loop for 3 and 5 divisibility, it won’t scale i think for other problems
Make your own website
- Yes, it helps you understand what you need, what you are actually writing. I have built an SSG and learnt a lot of things.
- It puts you under control, it helps you think broader, and not rely on third-party things all the time.
I can’t recommend Grafana to everyone
- Change is the fundamental in software, if something out there exist, it might not tomorrow, there is no gurantee, even if someone says so, might not.
- There are rare gems like SQLite, cURL, linux kernel and some of the fundamental tools that just work and don’t change or won’t change because that is what they do are supposed to do. No more no less, more they are adding, but it might come at the cost of backwards compatibility.

Watched

The probelm with AI Slop
- I am also quite happy, if we use LLMs to train on their own generated data, it will be a stangnation. Artists are going to thrive here, but that’s too dumb of a mistake these AI companies are to make. They can take all possible measures to make the people make use these chatbots more and more.

Gemini 3 is the best model ever made?
- Its a good model, it seems its quite heavy and removes the subtle mistakes and biases it has. I love hove Google makes a solid general purpose models. Unlike OpenAI, whose naming conventions are all over the place, its like a slop generation to me.
- But Gemini models hit different, they just solve what have been given to them. Quite a good upgrade from the 2.5 models.
- Waiting for Gemini 3 flash version

TOON vs JSON
- Its just CSV in disguise. YAML in some other way, nothing really surprising.

Building SSH TUI with Wish and Bubble Tea
- It was quite magical to see the TUI on a SSH, imagine you can just use a lot of applications with a nice interface from anywhere. That is a superpower.
- Charm has a really good intention and they have done a great job in solving the problems.

Learnt

GCP Log Explorer Admin API Routes
- Understand the Admin API, the request-response structure. The model design for which parameters to keep and are relevant for the TUI state.
- The log item components, it has the timestamp, the log level, the text, and the labels. It helps us making the design for the TUI as these are the lego blocks for it.
Construct a BubleTea Application
- The Model, View, and Update architecture is so ideal. It just fits well. So intuitive to use and feel.
Parse TOON-like structure to JSON
- Its no brainer that toon is a mix of YAML and CSV. KV fields are just YAML and List elements are CSV. Combine them, and here is your TOON.
- For input it’s an easy thing, but for making it generate the TOON Structure is no easy thing.

Tech News

Google Releases Gemini 3, Antigravity, and Nano Banana
- This is quite a hell of a release week. New Model, an AI Coding assistant IDE, and an image generation/editing tool.
OpenAI Releases GPT 5.1
- Is there a day when these companies held themselves back from releasing their own slight better models just to get a few eyeballs.
- No, they don’t. They just game the numbers of the evals and make everyone believe that they are the king and worth using and making them the default.
- I am sick of these tactics from both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta Releases SAM - Segment Anything Model 3rd version

This week and the next week or so are quite busy, I’ll be travelling out from home. So might miss out on next week’s edition. Its wedding season, and I have no power to refuse the invitation, forcefully or willingly, I’ll have to do my duty as a family member. Anyway, will catch up some other week for a fresh or exhausted fortnight.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#772nd edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

Techstructive Weekly #68

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #68

It was a great week. A consistent clean week. I wrote around 9k words on my project. I feel good again. I didn’t do much on the weekends as usual. I am slowing down. I did a lot of things at work, experiments, and more experiments on VLLMs and parsing documents. It’s fun times. I think for this weekend, I have plans as this post will cover what my mind is fixated on for the moment, Golang and TUIs, and a pain that is daily buzzing me, cleaning log files to get the actual data. LLMs are good at it, but take a bit of time for such trivial things.

Apart from this, I have also been reading, a lot of reading, I completed a book of 300 pages in 3 days and found peace. Started one more. I want to create a webpage full of my notes and reviews of all the books I have read so far, not sure if I can do it before the year ends.

Quote of the week

“To understand emotion, don’t seek the outcome, or the reaction, go deeper, find its intentions.”

This is my quote, I have observed from reading “Goddess of the River” by Vaishnavi Patel. The character of Karna, and his opinion about friendship with Duryodhan, is so subtle yet this is what I can comprehend. He went for the outcome. Duryodhan made him the king of Angadesh by giving him his part of the kingdom, to make him royal and worthy to compete with Arjun. He didn’t see the intention, his intention was to defeat Arjun. The revenge was in the minds of Duryodhan, not peace or friendship. He made everything in life less important than his loyalty and debt to repay the friendly help. If he knew the intention, he would have been on the right side of the war, maybe the war might have been averted. But no, he wanted to feel recognized and equal to Arjun too.

So, look beyond the outcome, the intention of an emotion or an act. The thing that drives the emotion is more important than the emotion itself. Don’t get carried away.

For similarity in this quote in tech, find the why, its important, go a level deeper. The question ‘what’ is already answered; you need the core intention to build something, to solve something. Without the intention, all software is slop.

Read

From words to worlds with spatial intelligence
- This a refreshing read, a positive take on the LLM thing. Its true, the words might have limitations, we don’t even know what true VLLMs are capable of, they can’t actually recognize the physical space, and what interpretations can they perform on it.
- The one thing that stuck with me was the use of LLM in education or learning. It is ranked or stated at the very end, indicating that LLMs are going to be least used to reform how we learn. If that is true, then I can take a relief. If they can’t change the way we learn things, I am a happy and satisfied person. It helps me use my brain rather than I handing over my neurons to it.
The AI Wildfire is coming and its going to be very painful and incredibly healthy
- A beautifully written comparison of natural phenomena to the current situation.
- The reset of nature as wildfire is really needed in Tech for AI to seed its place. It would burn the hype and leave behind it some mess and blessings that people who struggled here will clean up and reap the benefits.
- I don’t have much to say, a lot to say rather. I recommend just reading it, it gave me calmness, it’ll be just fine. AI is not coming to burn you, don’t worry, but there will be a new resource at our disposal. You know it, it has its pros and cons, the AI chat.
Parsing integers in C
- Its again one relatable post. The author is pointing out that he saw a problem. Parsing and robust handling of integers in C. I love python for it. I wonder how is it developed on top of C then. If C is worse than python for handing integers, how is Python working so well.
- cURL, that library man! The author and the creator of libcURL or cURL the tool is a legend, he is a gift to the developers and the world. The library is much more than a http client. It has laid so many ground works for making the ecosystem of working with the web and APIs coherently and without causing any confusions.
- This post highlights the presence of parser for string to integer conversion in cURL as well as cURLX libraries. It handles them in a more robust way than the typical standard C libraries.
Recommendations for getting most from technical books
- This is some gold advice on consuming technical content in general I think. Not just books. It could be a big blog post, video or any course. First consume it without distraction, try to understand next, try it on your own, try it again, think about what you want to do, do it and repeat from 2 again if you fail.
How to stop having FOMO as a software engineer
- This one is a hard hitting banger. yacine writes some banger posts.

shed for a minute all the other’s expectations and look deep, look at all the stuff that truly brings you a sizeable amount of joy in life.

- Yes, just bury all the expectation for once and do what you truly want to. I think this weekend, I would build a TUI for GCP Cloud Logger. Because I want to. No expectations. I don’t want to livestream, things get in the way, I don’t have the right set of mental clarity to write golang posts, I won’t for now. I’ll do what I love write now, things are overwhelming me. SQL, LLMs, VLLMs, Transformers, Vibe coding, PDFs, Rust, everything seems to sucking out the joy out of me, they are all great things, but I can’t handle them all at once. One thing at a time, and for this weekend, its TUI for GCP Cloud Logger, for sure.
Why I stopped trying to be a great engineer
- This is a wholesome post. Just read it, its so short.
- It conveys that taking a break from the normal chore, brings a fresh perspective and unclogs the brain. It helps your brain get out of the rut, it shows you a new hope, it fires a kindle of hope and curiosity. I guess, stopping to code, or writing some code if you haven’t been due to AI, just do what you wanted to do, but something or the other kept bugging you. Because when the heart and mind are in sync, impossible becomes possible.
The quite power of SQL
- This is true. After all, sometimes, not all new tools are worth using all the time. Sometimes, maybe often times, we need to keep it simple and use the good’ol trusted tools, the simplest ones just like SQL, the dc calculator, how LLMs are using the existing tools to create wide possibilities.
How to demo
- Some great advice on how to demo. It has some good catches. Keeping it shorter, slowly moving to the solution, not banging it in the start. Let the viewer understand the problem in its entirety then develop the intuition to your solution.
- Adding pictures add value, but I think it should be a concise representation of what is changing or what the crux of the presentation is, not just adding visuals just for the sake of it.
On doing things
- I don’t know nature is hinting this week to me to just do things. Right, I’ll do it.

Sometimes ideas come when you stop trying to force them.

- True. You have to just let it sleep with you. We say right, let me sleep on it, let it absorb, because the unconscious mind always keeps ticking off, it keep finding paths to connect, firing right set of neurons happen at a shower, at a walk, maybe just before the sleep. Just breathe, and let the world be it. Your in-action won’t cause it to fail, but don’t make it a excuse to never do it.

Watched

How Martain was written
- I haven’t read Martain, want to. But nonetheless, this is an inspiring talk, as a writer and a programmer I am compelled to write a story now. This might be a turning point for me. If he can, I can too.
- It appeared to me at the right time though, November in middle of NanoWriMo. Perfectly adding up to my writing streak and building confidence.
Building a terminal wizard in BubbleTea
- This is a great video to understand Bubble Tea framework in almost 20 minutes. I was pumped after this to finally decide to build the TUI for GCP logger. Finally it will be done this weekend.
How OpenAI Atlas is built
- Atlas is a chromium wrapper right? right? Nope, its a little custom separate entity that is powered and laid by chromium but it doesn’t look and feel like Chromium.
- I don’t know anything about what Theo said, but if he is saying its gross. It might as well be, I can’t comment if I don’t know it.

Learnt

Visual LLMs: Show then, don’t tell.
- If the VLLM has visual recognition, prompt tuning will only work till a point, you then have to show it, not tell it.
- Text LLMs are bottlenecks due to that exact reason, they can’t see. But if you add reasoning, it opens up a possibility. But if you power a VLLM with reasoning (Gemini 2.5 Flash) it is a superpower that you have honed it. I think this is barely explored territory and needs more eyes and experimentation.
Golang BubbleTea TUI Framework
- It has Model, View and Update as a core principle, which is the ELM Architecture style.
- It fits this style of developing the TUIs so well. You have some state to display, you present it and you update it. Simple. You can build almost anything with this principle. Would be trying out to build GCP Cloud Logger TUI.

Tech News

OpenAI releases GPT 5.1
- It looks like a general-purpose and more tunable model. Looking forward for the snitch bench test.
Google release Code Wiki
- Wow! This is a Holy Grail of code wiki. It can generate tons of things from a given github link. Very good point to start understanding a codebase if you want to contribute to. If you its hallucinated, you can prove it by running the code, simple

It was a whimsical week, the writing just gave me everything I needed in a week. Peace and Clarity of actions. I am in the right mood, at the right time. Just by spending one hour each day, I become a better version of myself every day. Good to write this way. Hopes to continue in the next week and year too.

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Techstructive Weekly #67

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 UTC

Week #67

It was a slow and steady week. New habits are emerging. It was a pleasant experience, I felt good, I kept myself out of the social media and content spiral doom-scrolling. Why? Because something changed the perspective of action and effect, the piece I was missing was intention.

Action, Intention, and Effect

I heard or read somewhere, that we feel anxious or we waste our time, not because of motivation, rather due to the lack of intentionality of the actions. If you are going to the web with a clear focus and a objective, no force or urge can stop you. Motivation helps but doesn’t carry you all the way. Its not one emotion or quality thing, rather all-hands together approach. You solely can’t rely on focus either, you need your inner fire, you need purpose, you need energy, you need the skills to do it. Nothing comes on its own with a single cause-effect, its a multi-dimensional world of action and effect.

I allocated time, to write, to read. And I did complete it, not fully, not perfect, but it got me moving, I knew A and D, it helped me get to B and understand that C exists. Sometimes, you don’t know the actual goal, you assume it is something, but it reveals as you go and take action. I wrote around 9k words on my project in 7 days. I am a satisfied person. What happens if NaNoWriMo isn’t there this year, I am not after writing 30k words in 30 days, I am on mission to complete the project. Maybe I know the goal, but the actual goal is appearing as I write my way through.

I am a software developer, trying to be a writer too. Its hard, but there is no harm in giving a shot, you never know what bug it might reveal, or it could be a feature not a bug!

Quote of the week

“What comes easy won’t last, and what lasts won’t come easy.”
-- Ntsiki KaCaleni

A perfect quote for the perfect time. AI generated slop. It comes easy. I don’t think it will last. By last we can relate to getting the love, getting the reward, or feeling accomplished. None of it is easy to get. If it was easy, it won’t be worth looking for, right?

Some things in life come with struggle, and that for a reason. If we really want to appreciate somethings, we really need to understand its value, its worthiness. We can’t get something easily and be satisfied forever with it. AI generated anything is not lasting long. Code, Images, text, nothing. I delete the code that I accepted last week this Monday. If not, eventually next week when something breaks. Because I didn’t toil hard for producing it, that’s the thing, if it has become easier to produce art or code, does it mean art is not worth it? No, AI-generated art is not worth it, human generated, or natural art is what drives me here to write this exact post, and has carried humanity thus far in the world.

Read

Learning loops and LLMs
- This is a true analogy. This is highlighting about the world relating software development with a assembly line.

In software, design emerges through implementation. We often need to write code before we can even understand the right design. The feedback from code is our primary guide. Much of this cannot be done in isolation.

- I like this mindset. I agree to this 100%. Building software is about coming to a design, not just producing it. The why, the what are the questions the software development solves. How is the question that the code solves, its just a means to an end. I have learnt it the hard way.
- There are no shortcuts to learning. This is another one that sticks to me. You can produce code, but that’s not the only responsibility of a developer. The code needs to solve something that you know, not LLM. You need to architect it based on the problem we are trying to solve.
- Using LLMs to increase the things that we can experiment with is a good tool and direction. But then you need to plan, think, fail and iterate. It cannot be just prompt and done. You need to sit and read the things it generates, think about them, make changes, remove and write it yourself if needed. It can write code, but cannot build software solution. Yet!
You should write an agent
- A good one. You need to experience the thing in order to have an opinion. That’s quite obvious. But people coming on conclusions about AI and LLMs don’t quite think that way. They do one thing and generalize their opinion. Generalization of experiences is not good.
- I have used Cursor, cursor-agent cli, gemini cli, and amp cli free version. I can have opinions about them. But I cannot about Claude Code, Codex, and the bazillions of those CLI agentic models.

Turns out: context engineering is a straightforwardly legible programming problem. You’re allotted a fixed number of tokens in any context window. Each input you feed in, each output you save, each tool you describe, and each tool output eats tokens.

- This is well put. I agree to that. People and marketing blogs really buzz about context window, but its just a list of strings, it becomes quite obvious why it can bloat pretty quickly if you keep on adding more functions (tools, its description, the parameters, the docstrings, and what not for each call).
- It also simplified the buzzword of context engineering, its just what effectively you can put without repeating and keeping in only precisely the ingredients for producing the meal.
Is it really good enough
- This is a banger post. It has so many relatable things and points to discuss. But the below quote hits it.

Most software is garbage. AI-generated garbage isn’t notably worse.

- A precise description of AI-generated garbage, its spitted like anything. I can add one more quote to this, which would be the quote of the week for this week. If a code can be produced easily, its not worth it, the thing that takes time is the worth.
Lessons from vibe coding
- I would have loved this post, but the AI-generated image just threw me off a bad impression. But it was chess, how can I resist this.
- I read this, and felt good. A human admitting his mistake. Going all in AI and failing hard, then going again but from the lessons learned from the fall.

AI coding tools are force multipliers for developers who know what they’re doing. They’re force randomizers for those who don’t.

- A banger of a line. If you know what you are doing, then you already have done your part, that is to think.
- And this one too.

Thinking AI eliminates complexity is like thinking cars eliminate the need to know where you’re going. You’ll move fast, but it’ll probably be in the wrong direction

- Speed is useless without direction. We all can agree to that. Having a dumb engineer with claude code is -10x efficient then having gemini cli to a real soy dev.
AI is Dunning-Kruger as a Service
- Agreed. This is the opposite of imposter syndrome. It hits like ego. You think, that you have done the job without thinking. We are at such a conjecture that we are trying to feel like done something without doing it. AI-art for instance, if you put it on your thumbnail or post it, what are you really doing, pretending that you made it? Having the feel of creating something without creating it?
- I stopped creating ai generated thumbnails on this newsletter after a couple of attempts as it felt boring. I didn’t get anything from that. No satisfaction nor skill.
Mr. TIFF
- It was just a pleasant read. No controversy, no fluff. Just two humble and honest humans doing their job. This world would be so beautiful if each human did its job correctly, just correctly, not exceeding the expectation or performing a all-nighter. Just completing his or her job correctly is so under-rated.

Watched

I haven’t watched anything this week that is worth sharing and technical enough. I have replaced my youtube watching time with 1 hour writing sprints. For the past whole week, I wrote around 9k words. I had a goal and I am moving towards it. I don’t know if youtube is worth watching anymore. I’ll enjoy other things while I can.

Learnt

Flask has a after_request decorator/hook, that we can use to run at the end of a request.
- I added it to log a request, created a state and appended/put to the state after a even happening at any part of the API. Then using that state, I dumped it in a log, that gave a reliable and a singular data point to gather and analysis data. A good pattern to remember and learn from.
Zellar’s congruence algorithm to calculate the weekday from a given date
- This was a problem of the day in the freecodecamp daily challenge. I love it, it helped me learn this algorithm. Its so trivial to implement yet feels so useful to get weekday of any given date. Leave the timezone mess aside for a moment.
- It as simple as this

year, month, day = 2025, 11, 05
if month < 3:
   month = month + 12
   year = year - 1
k = year % 100
j = year // 100
day_digit = (day + (13 * (month+1)) // 5 + k + k // 4 + j // 4 + 5 * j) % 7
# 0 is Saturday, 1 is Sunday and so on.

Tech News

Moonshot.ai releases Kimi K2 Thinking model

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter (#770th edition), and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev.

It was a fun start of the penultimate month of 2025. Hopefully, the rest of the month go just like this and I will have most of my goals of the year completed.