# Oceans, Mountains and ... Code?

Its July of 2026. We are halfway through the year and it has without an ounce of doubt been the most eventful year of my life. Twenty twenty six has been a year of firsts for me. First time trekking through the mountains of Nepal, first time seeing the ocean, first time shipping a real working product..and many more.

In this blog post, I am dumping some of the thoughts I have had over this past 6 months.

# The Shortcut Debate

Me and my friends from Vivasoft Nepal went on a trek on March to Khorchan Hill, a part of the Great Macchapuchhre Trail. It was the first ever trek of my life and of course it is one of the core memories of my life.

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As an unfit individual who is several standard deviations away from the average on the weighing scale, the trek was especially difficult for me. Most people walked faster than me so I found myself walking alone in some parts of the trail. Walking through a thick fog in the cold weather, well it gives you time to think a lot.

Sahil bhai, the youngest, fittest and the most enthusiastic of the group was constantly taking these crazy alternative routes and was encouraging us to "take the shortcut" as well. Some people followed him, some did not. You could guess which group I am a part of.

It got me thinking about something much larger about shortcuts. In any point of my life I have never taken a "shortcut". I passed high school, got my bachelor's degree and got a corporate job. I am not saying I am unhappy but I do look at people who took what look like shortcuts to me. Some went abroad, some dropped out and some took unconventional jobs. All I can think about is how they could take the shortcut and how I opted not to do any of those things. They look content with their life online, while I am having second thoughts about the life path I have taken.

Sahil took shortcuts on the trek, he reached the summit faster than me. But, eventually I also did reach the same summit. I also saw the same amazing panoramic mountain views. I would debate I felt more happy looking at the views because it was just that much more difficult for me.

That is what is kind of keeping me going. My life is moving slow, but I will reach the summit one day, and I will be content with all that I have achieved.

# The Ocean

For those of you who aren't obsessed with me and don't know everything about my life: this year I spent 2 months in Bangladesh this year for a professional trip with Vivasoft.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/66a903d8bd65466a53389ed4/6761c173-cace-4d5d-aed8-876eae68949c.png align="center")

To be completely honest, I had very low hopes for Bangladesh. I just thought it was going to be just another unmanaged, dirty and noisy third world country. While some of that still holds, Bangladesh still surprised me.

One thing about Bangladesh is that, every is grander in Bangladesh. The Bay of Bengal in Cox's Bazar, the Padma River in Rajshahi and Mawa Ghat, the buildings in Banani, the crowd in Puran Dhaka, and most importantly the portion sizes in Sultan's Dine.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/66a903d8bd65466a53389ed4/5f5dc0ad-cd00-47bd-8286-de7325c23a30.png align="center")

The Macchhapucchre Mountain, the Indian Ocean, and the Padma River all had the same effect on me: all of them made me feel small. I don't know how else to explain this feeling but it was so easy to get lost in these sights. While I was in front of these grand feats of nature, nothing else mattered. It was just me, the sight and my ideas.

All I felt was these deep sense of peace. All these experiences were not just handed to me. They came as a result of my choices and my hard work.

# Goodbye Boss

Ever since I met Talha bhai, he has been a figure of inspiration for me. There are many engineers in the world but only some of them think about systems in such a different perspective like Talha bhai does. He is truly an thinker and a creator. He doesn't seem to care about software and systems in a way that other people do.

A few months ago, Talha bhai decided to leave Vivasoft. We did spend a few good moments with him in Dhaka, but it still feels empty somewhere. At this point, I have unpinned Discord from my app dock and pinned Mattermost there.

I joined Vivasoft without ever making a single LLM inference, without even knowing what an embedding is. Talha bhai's leadership has has a significant impact on my life. I will miss the random talks about code, philosophy or anything we used to have unprompted.

The very nature of software engineering is optimizing things down to every cent and nanosecond, and sometimes it becomes difficult for great ideas to survive. I am sure Talha bhai is going to do something huge. Wishing him luck for everything he does and achieves in the future.

# Everyone likes Tasdik

The Nepal office, the Rajshahi office and the Dhaka office of Vivasoft all give a very different vibe, but one thing I found across all three offices is that there are people everywhere who like Tasdik.

But why? *(saying this with a bit of confusion and a lot of disgust)*

You need to sit down with Tasdik and start speaking about anything you can think of and the crazy thing is, Tasdik always joins in. He always has some information about some random thing no matter how obscure it is.

Then it hit me: everyone likes Tasdik for the same reasons that they like ChatGPT. They are both very easy to talk to. They always seem to be available and know what they're talking about. They don't always agree with you, but even then they find a way to keep the conversation going.

But Tasdik has one thing that ChatGPT doesn't: a di.., ummm I mean, a desire to learn. If Tasdik does not know about something he will find a way to gather information about that sooner or later, then he will continue the conversation with you.

What makes us want to learn? LLMs are like dogs, seeking our "good boy". Can this need to learn for ourselves be programmed? Is it a bad idea if AI starts thinking about itself?

# Agentic Coding is the future, isn't it?

First time ever I spoke to Aninda bhai was when he was explaining a poem to Tasdik. It was an Urdu poem he has written as was reciting every line slowly with a slight smile. Aninda bhai sat just a few seats aways from me in the Dhaka office, we barely spoke but I would always see him smiling with Tasdik or working silently with his headphones on.

Then came code review day. "My f-ing maid can write this code", he exclaimed with his Bengali accent turning the swear word into phucking.

The code we presented was something we whipped up in a few days due to ever changing client requirements and a short timeline. That is a good politically correct and diplomatic excuse, but the real matter of the fact is that we were inexperienced developers who started trusting AI agents blindly.

If the code review came from anyone else, even someone more senior, I don't think it would have had this much of an impact on our practices. But that one interaction just completely changed our working style making us better and more mindful engineers.

We had a few more conversations with Aninda bhai after that, some about best practices, and some about him still teasing us about our reliance on Claude.

# Product and Ownership

During the start of this year, we shipped our very first project to a real client from the Nepal office. It was two separate stages, we first deployed our AI Powered QA Analytics Dashboard and the second was a AI powered call center agent.

Last time Talha bhai and Rafael bhai came to Nepal, they planted the idea of working towards becoming a Product Manager in my head. During the PoC delivery of this project, I finally got a taste of what that might look like.

I handled all the client communication, requirement gathering, feature proposals and team management. While it was way stressful than I imagined, I had a lot of fun doing that. It felt like it was my product that I created.

Now, the project has moved up ranks and has moved out of the PoC and MVP state. We have real people from the product team doing the work I did during the PoC delivery. While I am still proud of what we created, it does not feel like my product anymore. I mean, some modules and some product decisions are mine, but the product as a whole belongs to someone else.

I need to probably be in a senior role to feel that kind of ownership to an entire product again.

I have always had this urge to use computers to create. It started with MS Paint, moved to online blogs (you can still find my blogspot blog I made when I was like 7-8 if you look hard enough), then I moved to tech content creation (RIP MoMo Tech Nepal), finally discovered coding.

I am having second thoughts about possibly moving to a product role. I have a feeling that I would not get the chance to create, but I would only be facilitating other people to create.

But well, I am still very early in my career and I feel like I would need more context before I can speak or think about anything else.

# **Conclusion**

If you made it till here, then thank you so much for going through my random thoughts. Hopefully I will have done in the next 6 months to write something like this in the end of this year.

Congratulations! You have reached the end of this blog post. I hope that this post was helpful to you. If you hope to read more posts like this, consider following me on Hashnode, and joining the newsletter.

If you have any queries or suggestions, please leave a comment or reach out to me directly by sending an email to [**mukul.development@gmail.com**](mailto:mukul.development@gmail.com)**.**