Hello, welcome to my first weeknote. I feel tired in a good way and I have been working so much that I never even had the chance to sit in melancholy by the window and watch the first pre-monsoon rains pour dramatically! This is unacceptable. Regardless, by the end of the week I have many untriaged thoughts that are floating around my head like bouncing DVD logos. Here are some highlights of the week:

Work:

• Vibe coded open source contributions will be the death of me. AI enables incompetence at scale. The people who put in hours, days or weeks of work into making sure their work meets code and design standards are idiots, apparently. It's really killing the spirit of an open source community when people who have probably never even looked at the code are telling their unpaid high school student intern of an AI agent to build a mammoth feature for a software I'm not even sure they've actually used once in their lives. And guess who gets to review their shitty designs?! 😃
• On the polar opposite side of the argument, I used Claude's help to get my dev environment up and running again and it was crazy. Like, 80% faster. What do you mean I can just paste logs and not do anything else to figure out why my setup broke? It probably has all my bank account details and my mother's maiden name by now though. Welp, that's a problem for future Nim.
• From next week I will not work on Mondays! Having the "I am bored and also maybe burnt out" conversation with my boss was scary, but he was rather supportive of my reduction in work hours, and it will hopefully be worth the pay cut. I am excited to figure what I could do or not do with this extra time.

Not-work:

• I have been watching videos by Saleh Kayyali about very ground-level interface design in the age of AI. It's piquing my interest in HCI and pure computer science again! My favourites so far are this one about how AI fails to design for any state that's not on the happy path, and this one about the death of deep work in programming and the cognitive load of task switching while waiting for AI to write code.
• The dance class is really scratching the 3-AM-at-a-house-party itch. I learnt choreography to songs from Billu, Welcome, and Race in the last month and I couldn't be happier. I am not getting any better at dancing (seriously, how in the world do tall skinny people dance?) but I am probably getting more fit. The cause of my back pain increasing cannot be confidently attributed to the dance class considering how much I've been working at my desk and PMS.
• The Australian media has blessed the world with another season of Masterchef. So far I have high hopes, it's actual home cooks (no chefs as contestants) and they are a really likable bunch!
• I loved The Drama. An anxiety-inducing morally ambiguous romance? Sign me up. Impossible to review without spoilers, though, so I will leave it at that.
• I watched the first few episodes of Haikyuu, and I could see why I thought everyone was gay when I watched the movie without any context last year. Just kiss already!

Discoveries:

• The gigantic English cucumbers go great in Thai curry. It's giving southekai but crunchy, makes the curry taste a bit like sambar (in a good way).
• Amul ice malai feels like eating butter flavoured ice cream, revolutionary.
• Omm Nom Nomm's Peppermint Happy Chip ice cream is the best mint choc-chip ice cream I've ever had (come at me, mint haters).
• Subko's scrambled eggs are the best scrambled eggs I've ever had.
• Subko's butter chicken is probably the best butter chicken I've ever had (after Reet's mom's butter chicken, of course).
• More of a rediscovery, but Michael Jackson is truly the King of Pop. The algorithm timed the recommendation perfectly, right when the movie is releasing so I can get sufficiently hyped.
• This is the opposite of a discovery but why is there literally not a single cafe in Bangalore that sells decaf coffee? The ones who have the purest love for coffee are done the dirtiest 😞

I am already intimidated by how much work I have to do next week but I will try to sit more and work less. See you next week!