Tag Archives: claude

Weekly Notes 2026/16

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  • Very dry week. No sign of rain. The temperature is high and there is no forecast of rain either. I am hoping for next week to be bit cooler.
  • I gave a talk at a student club at APU.
  • I am joining Toyota Connected India next week. Pretty excited about writing Rust in safety critical systems.
  • I am getting a better grip on AI tools. I am still conflicted if I should continue to use them or go back to good old ways. Lets wait for a few more weeks.

Reading List

Weekly Notes 2026/15

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  • First two weeks of April are usually the hottest weeks in Bangalore. Its less dry than the 2025 but only one light shower. The mangoes outside my house are growing nicely though.
  • Its been three weeks since I’ve written code by hand (except for a few tweaks). I am using Claude and sometimes qwen cli. Claude is definitely much better but qwen is quite capable at well scoped tasks.
  • I don’t think AI is replacing programmers anytime soon but sure making me dumber. It is becoming harder to focus, read docs and engage with a linear conversation. Also when I ran out of the credits, I had to push myself to open my editor and look at the code and I found it alarming.
    • My TLDR summary of AI is the following. It generates pig-iron and call it steel. You can build a fun Choo-Choo train with it over the weekend but please don’t build a proper train with it that carries hundreds of people. But can you resist?

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/14

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  • For last three weeks, I am doing vibe coding for almost everything. It is helping me understand its power and limitation. I feel like everyone is right about AI. This reminds me a saying about India, “Whatever you can rightly say about India, its opposite is equally true.”.
  • Ookie is at her mama place for last two weeks. She will be back this Sunday. She is having very good time in Toranagallu.
  • I vibe coded an app https://github.com/dilawar/trim-dead-area to trim dead areas from a video (auto-crop to most interesting parts). It started off very fast but tweaking is extremely hard with mixed results. Learning about ffmpeg was a joy using Claude. More here https://dilawar.in/2026/vibe-coding-a-gui-to-auto-crop-dead-zones-from-a-video/.

Using Claude in a small C++ library

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Long back, I ported LSODA solver to C++ (https://github.com/dilawar/libsoda-cxx) for a neural simulator I was working on during my PhD. This port is almost the same as the reference C code except for STL containers and some other goodies (and some OB1 errors).

Today, I used Claude to improve unit tests and docs and enhance CMake integration.

First, I asked Claude to look in scipy codebase, search for LSODA related tests, and add them to my project. It did a great job and wrote a better commit message than I would have done but that’s not saying much! The tests Claude wrote used assert which is a noop in release build i.e. these assert won’t be there in release build so passing tests in release are meaningless. When I pointed this out, it replaced them with runtime exception that works with both debug and release build. Not cool, Claude but not bad either. Its C++!

Then I ask for a CMake harness so that folks can integrate my library into their CMake based workflow easily. I did OK at first attempt and made a boo-boo which was caught by Coderabbit review bot (free for open source). Claude fixed it later!

All of it took roughly 30 minutes!

If you are very very familiar with existing codebase then I don’t think Claude/AI tools add too much value. With hot cache, I could have done it in one hour. The advantages of 30 minutes of time saving may not be worth losing your touch with something you enjoy i.e. programming and story building in your head. I definitely feel that I am on “opium” when I use it for a long time.

Claude is very very good at things at which I am below average. Which is true for almost all the things I am doing with Claude thee days. So it is not unnatural that these tools enjoy great reputations among users. More objectively, good AI tools are perfect for things that feels like chores e.g. “translate tests from this Python implementation to C++” or “reproduce this bug and when you find it commit it on a branch” or “create a new project with this and that”.

At my last stint at a medium size org that lasted a month, we are asked to use Claude code as much as possible. Sure, I finished a task in half an hour that would have taken a person familiar with the codebase 3 hours but the PR is still pending review after 12 days! So where are the gains? Beware of Amdahl law as well!

As many have pointed out before that AI tools are very eager to achieve success. They will try to achieve it by any means. Once in a while they will stop and ask you but most of time, they will find a plausible solution. Ensure that your prompt has the definition of “success/done” and “properly” articulated. Discuss it with all stakeholders when a ticket is created otherwise you’ll get something that kind of work but it does not.

Weekly Notes 2026/13

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Growing mangoes in my neighborhood
  • The mangoes outside my home are growing bigger nicely. It’s finally nice to see fruits grow in the neighborhood.
  • It was a tough month at work. After thinking hard about my team work culture, my interaction with my manager, and his un-willingness to find me a new team (unless I am his relative), and consulting two of my manager friends, I decided to submit resignation.
    • I had a narrow escape at Bellary road while coming back from office. That also significantly contributed to the decision.
    • They are also moving office to a new location and that uncertainty also contributed to the decision.
  • I had another interview just after I submitted my resignation. You should not do both things at the same day, please! It went horribly wrong.
  • One Microsoft interview was in pipeline. I failed the fourth round (I guess). I am not keep on giving more interviews this year.
  • I am planning to do independent consultant work. I have already have two clients and it should be sufficient to get started. Lets see how it evolves.

Reading list

Weekly Notes 2026/12

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  • All rounds of Toyota interviews are finally over. The HR discussion lasted 90 minutes. I enjoyed most of it.🤞
    • And they rejected! Apparently I am over qualified. Didn’t they know from the resume? The reason is perhaps something else — a wrong pause between sentences! I was under the impression that things are going very well.
  • Early this week, a light shower. The leaves of the mango tree outside my house are cleaned! It wasn’t strong enough to clean the dust from the road and wash my parked car. Two days later, we had a good enough rain that washed my car. The mangoes on the tree outside my home are big enough to pickle :-). This year March is not as hot as the last one. Already a few showers.
  • Due to LPG shortage, the restaurant near my workplace is serving a few items, mostly dosa, tea, coffee! At least they are open. But only a fraction of people are working. Everyone pays for the war expect for people who started it?
  • At work, use of AI tools are now compulsory. I am learning to use them, begrudgingly!
    • I already have a big win. I was given .NET6 codebase with empty readme file — a language I never wrote. I asked Claude to act as a staff engineer/product manager and walk me though the codebase and quiz me later. The purpose of walk-through: I can contribute to the codebase. It did a much much better job than a co-worker would have done. It saved me so many pings and emails.
  • I learnt more about AI tooling yesterday from a talk by a coworker. This blog post was also pretty helpful explaining how context window size impacts the quality of response.
    • When the context is filled, the quality of response suffers. The context size is typically 20,000 to 1,000,000. An archive paper is roughly 10,000 tokens. So its not very large!
    • Either you drop some of the context (loose information) or do compaction (summarize the context) and loose nuance. While compacting, pinning important information helps. Perhaps claude is already doing all that. For a general purpose chatbot, I see why this could be a hard problem to solve. A single word may have the most nuance.
  • In other news, uv, ruff and ty joins OpenAI. These tools are created by Astral. Many AI companies have been buying tooling (especially cli tooling).