October 25nd, 2026
It has been 4 months since my last post, and the world has changed quite a lot.
Work has been fun. In fact, it has never been more fun. I think all of this vibe-coding stuff has genuinely made my productivity better. I can now apply my knowledge and experiment different things without wasting my time with implementation. I am glad I took a gamble during university. I learned as many applicable engineering and mathematics concepts as possible instead of spending any of my time programming. I think this strategy definitely paid off and put me into the position where I am. I do not know how to maintain a good codebase, manage memory, or make nice modular code. Yet, I am allowed to be software engineer. How crazy is that? Also, I think working a start-up is pretty fun. Working is addicting, and I’ve been staying up until the morning multi-tasking development and research work. It feels like college all over again. And no, I don’t think that increasing shareholder value is giving me the satisfaction. I’m kinda doing my dream job. Definitely the best new-grad opportunity given my situation. Very happy that I ended up here. Though, I must say that I now have a productivity addiction. Below is an average work day.
if [morning meeting OR lunch time]:
wake up
lunch @ office
work
dinner @ office
if [want to go home OR dizzy from exhaustion]:
go home and sleep
else:
work until no ideas OR tired
“I realized that I can just do shit” is probably the best possibly way to summarize my epiphany.
I’ve actually gained a lot of confidence in terms of my own capabilities from this as well. There have been multiple occasions where I though I thought of a very original and novel algorithm [of course formalized through LLMs] to apply for state estimation. Usually, it has already been done, which takes away from the novelty. However, I think that it is quite remarkable that I still have my conscious engineering skills to come up with something that I didn’t explicitly learn.
Despite all of this hype around working in industry, I’m still working on some projects relevant to robotics and mathematics. These LLM tools are really allowing people like me contribute to active areas of research. One could argue that is disingenuous, but as long as I am doing the learning and most of the thought, I think it’s fine. I have a pretty cool project wrapping up soon.
In terms of other things, I think I have reached a decent checkpoint in my life. I have finally purchased by Pump it Up machine for my home, and I modded it enough for decent gameplay experience. However, I haven’t played as much as I wanted because of work. Despite all of the enjoyment, I definitely obliterated my WLB. Peep one of my live streams.
With that part of life that kinda complete, I want to enrich myself in terms of human connection. Might get back into teaching.
Other than that, I have been doing pretty well in terms of everything else. I practiced on looking and moving forwards in terms of my life rather than moping at the situation.
I have a handful of things I want to share or talk about. But that’s for another day. This is mostly just a check-in.
“People only change when they want to.” -Kumar