Techstructive Weekly #117
Tech reflections and insights from a developer’s soul
Techstructive Weekly #117
Reading a bit, working with agents and watching a few resourceful videos among the other things learnt in the week from 25th to 31st October 2026
Week #117
It was a busy week after a festive week. I worked on with an agent trying to replace code with an LLM call, that was weird but there are a lot of things I can learn from that. Like setting up so that an agent can make the transition better, having the understanding of the problem and actually able to solve it. That level of skill I haven’t yet gotten. Maybe I am too narrow-minded and still working with the mindset of walking when riding a race-car right? Working with agents is like being in a race car but not able to fully use it, because we haven’t fully appreciated the normal car enough?
That’s what I want to learn. I don’t think this week or the upcoming weekends are peaceful. Since its Diwali next weekend, and this weekend, it will be cleaning and chores, so reading is what I would prefer in pockets of spare time.
Quote of the Week
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that”
True. Darkness is not something that can stand on its own, its not a thing, its a lack of light. Hatred is not a feeling, its a lack of love or compassion towards something or someone. If there is absence then it can only be filled with it and nothing else, or not more of the lackness.
The argument “Tit for tat” doesn’t work all the time, it can backfire if someone is in turnmoil or hasn’t gotten enough love, a adult in depression cannot be neglected, he might have not gotten love in the childhood. We cannot lighten up something by turning off more lights. If you have a choice to light up or blow out a hope, always choose lighting up.
Read
Danluu Blog: We should be more ambitious with software
This is the general trend that we are all observing. Being more ambitious, being more productive, setting bigger goals and tasks, dreaming big. Being fast is also a new metric in software I think. This is not wrong, like AIs are making grunt work just go away with a simple words, or even speaking. You can just ask it and it will do it.
But, what about understanding. Does speed comes without knowing the tradeoffs? Maybe that is the standard expectations now.
Why even bother going deep right? Why even understand how a browser or DNS works, or how SSL and certification of HTTP works? Oh you don’t know that 4 can be a weak random number for certification encryption? Oh you are not a programmer, you are a brogrammer!
I think this is important, everyone is now able to expand their breadth of knowledge, as a developer the disctinction would be to have a depth of knowledge about something, it might seem its redundant to know it, considering how quickly these models are able to do what they are told, but I think it gives a edge over the assumptions the model might make.
Good points here. Curiosity to show empathy from users perspective or eagerness to solve something. I think this has gone on steroids now. But interviewing is a different ball game right? How can that be tested in small duration of time? Designing something impossible is just like asking to test his/her problem solving skills and ability to think through a solution. Is that not different from what is the driving force for the candidate to work at that company?
I think the test should be of what the candidate has built already and why and challenge his/her stance and make him contradict his own idea or approach, can you be squared in your own ambitions and built craft?
Watched
CS50 Show with David Malan Season 1 Episode 1
Very interesting initiative from CS50, I liked it a lot. I explained the Huggingface and OpenAI incidents, the productivity myth of AI coding, re-creating or reverse-engineering software and JPEG XL format.
The huggingface incident was really talked in detail and helped me understand the over-all picture of the situation, though there might be a ton of videos and articles on it from origin of them, but I am just too tired to read or watch those slop. The balanced take on productivity of developers was a good one too, a can write code but can’t build robust software it seems, it can now check its own output but still there needs to be some intuition and gardening done to it.
Programmers vs Dream Fake Manhunts Standup 76
Wow! A banger of a episode, though it was entertainment to guess the cuts, but there were a lot of technical concepts explained too like server glitches, frames and stuff.
Learnt
Agents can do a lot with MCP but even without MCP they can work with APIs just fine.
I think MCP is just a convention, rest is just REST APIs right? I was not able to connect the mcp for a tool but it found the mcp spec, it was able to workaround it and hit the api, that’s cool right?
Tech News
Mistral makes Mistral Large 4 opensource
Its good that they made it opensource, but why was it not initially open sourced? Was it worse then the frontier model, that they found it suitable and ranking amongst the open sourced models?
What is the purpose of it? Like who is using it? Why keep it closed just to a territory and a paid tier if it’s that good. And what harm can it do?
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That’s it from the 117th Edition of techstructive weekly. I hope you found it helpful, and relaxing. If not please drop any suggestions, feedback or discussion about certain things you want to in the comments or drop me a message on my socials.
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Until next week.
Happy Coding :)
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