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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  2. 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

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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 :)