Week of Aug 30th, 2025

6 min read

Meta #

What do you write in your weeknotes? What do you keep from it? I don’t think I have a metric - I’m as raw or as secretive as I feel like being in the moment. This is, unfortunately, terrible op-sec. Ostensibly the weeknotes are a thing to allow friends to keep in touch with me, and non-friends to develop parasocial relationships with me. I’ve changed my relationship with writing enough that putting words to something no longer feels scary, but publishing it does make it feel final, like it’s etched in stone. It’s a complicated feeling. #

Work #

what goes into building an agent? #
what goes into building a [thing? agent?] that builds agents? #
how can I “overengineer” something? Not in terms of yak shaving, but in terms of levels of abstraction? This one has been surprisingly hard. #
I’ve always thought of things in the backend as a “black box”, as an abstraction layer I don’t need to care about. It’s been a struggle to get rid of that mindset. #
I think I’m stressing too much about work. Reminder to self - you’re building toys!! Yes, you’re getting paid to build toys but it’s the process of building that is valuable here and right now! What a privilege this is. #

code gen practices #

It’s been easier to work within a .agents/prompts/ folder and tell Claude to use the folder than to work within the terminal alone. #
https://agent-rules.org/ has been a good thinking guide #
I need to get better at prompt engineering ugh #

Life #

This has certainly been one of the weeks of all time. #

Anu and I bid goodbye to each other last Saturday. He’s been such a vital part of my life in the last four years. But our relationship is going to change now. I’m grateful having had him the way I have, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how our relationship evolves over the next few months/years. #

On Sunday I held a friend through a bad mental health situation. Then we went and ate bbq tandoori momos, and like, three bun maskas. All was right within the world again. I really like where my house is located, and have big gripes that more friends don’t come over. There are SO MANY excellent food places around me! I have tried a very small fraction of them. #

Tuesday RC coworking ritual has extended to a subset of us heading to someone’s home, and hanging out until late at night. We talk about tech/society, cook, and generally just be in each other’s presence. It’s a new experience to me to have friends younger than me. I’m really enjoying it! I think my only real experience with dealing with people younger than me is dealing with my brother. Of course, we have a trash relationship (when one sibling is queer, the other’s homophobia can throw a damper on things), but I’ve noticed that I also tend to fall into didactic mode when I’m talking to him. That’s not very helpful? Or how I want to conduct my relationships. It’s definitely something to watch out for. #

Two days of work. I ate at reasonable hours, took breaks at reasonable hours. It is hard to push yourself when most of the work is in figuring out what actually needs to be done. #

This weekend was my cousin’s wedding. It brought up really complex feelings for me. My mamas (who I have loved my whole life) want to deny my mum her inheritance. It’s not about the land at all (the inheritance would be a very small parcel) but it’s about the right to exist on that land. That house has housed four generations of my mum’s family. I grew up there. I want to know that I’ll always be welcome there. #

I suppose being welcome has not much to do with rights and lots to do with the relationship you have with the people who live there. My extended family is extremely conservative (ie where my brother learnt his homophobia from, but also think: the people who funded the RSS 60 years ago) and it’s very hard to relate to them. In small towns all words are double speak. I cannot say one thing and slyly mean another even if it would save my life. I met some cousins I hadn’t seen in ten years as part of this wedding and immediately got made fun of for existing (not homophobic bullying! Just the regular kind) but learnt that they’re all pretty close to each other because they drink together (and lots) every weekend. #

I don’t understand alcohol culture. I definitely don’t understand it from people who bullied me my whole life for thinking thoughts that defied the mainstream - or maybe the bullying was for not knowing the social structures enough to just say what I was thinking? #

I’m going to be living alone for the next few months. I really want to do the residency but I’m probably going to have to go into an office for this contract so I don’t know how useful it will be to other people. I still have a friend who needs to build a portfolio and a friend with a short story to finish, so I will be annoying them about staying over until they do. #

I also have a budget for home decor again. I have to spend some money on replacing appliances, and some money on buying things from my roommate, but I have ordered some new curtains and a balcony bench I’m pretty excited about! #

Health #

It has been mostly good! I have stopped doing the nasal sprays for a bit because my nose feels very sensitive. I need to get started on that again. #

Media Diet #

Reading #

I’ve made good progress on The Day I Became a Runner. Not much else, to be honest. My feed reader is getting a lot more love from me than books these days. #

Listening #

Ankur and Azan introduced me to the genre of math rock. Which is great! Think God is an Astronaut (one of my all time fav artists) but more… complex, more brain scrambly. #