[4/11-4/17] 2026 Goal Progress

Health

Personal Gym Session #13: Deadlift Finally Hit 120kg

Went to my 13th session.

Bench press was 70kg for 2 reps, then 90kg for 10 reps × 2 sets. The weights keep climbing.

And deadlift hit 120kg. With a bit of spotter help, but it went up. Just last week I was celebrating breaking the 102.5kg three-digit barrier, and now I'm already at 120kg.

Squat was 70kg for 8 reps. But my form is still iffy, so I also dropped to 40kg and focused on solid form for higher reps.

Thanks to Deadlifts, the V-Shape is Coming In

My body is getting that V-shape thanks to deadlifts. My posture has gotten really good again too. Bodyweight is now at 76kg.

The strategy hasn't changed: deliberately doing nothing but the Big 3. My shoulders still feel kind of small, but my chest has changed dramatically. This is the phase of building the foundation with the Big 3.

Challenge: Lower Back Strain on Heavy Deadlifts

That said, when I deadlift heavy, the load is still going to my lower back. My form is still iffy. Maybe the weight is just too much for me right now.

Still, I'm glad I extended the weight.

Sleep Quality Feels Like It's Improving

Sleep was a bit all over the place, but I was mostly waking up between 7 and 8am. My rhythm wasn't disturbed and I didn't stay up late.

Except — Netflix's "Japan's Bomb" was trending so I binged it until 1:30am one night. Even then, I didn't oversleep, didn't have a chaotic morning, and wasn't sleep-deprived. Maybe my stamina is building up. I think my sleep quality might be getting better.

Quitting Smoking: Total Failure

Quitting smoking is a total failure. I think I'm actually smoking more. This is bad.

When I'm at the office it cuts down a lot, and I deliberately don't bring cigarettes when I go out. And I had a fair amount of outings this week...

I haven't been counting strictly, but I just don't feel like quitting right now. Being honest.

Work

A System That Turns Tasks Into PRs in 10 Minutes

This week's highlight, hands down.

I had a pile of tasks and figured each one would take a few hours to grind through. But before doing that, I built a workflow that automatically generates pull requests from tasks.

Once it was working, the 7 tasks I'd planned to do in a day came out as PRs in literally 10 minutes. Almost ready for QA. This was a huge step.

The workflow itself runs on a scheduled job, so if I just set a specific status in Notion, it picks them up and implements them automatically.

I've been jamming the team's context — skills, rules, everything — hard into the repo, so the deliverables are pretty aligned with intent. This was a real breakthrough.

"People Who Just Code" Will Be Eliminated

I genuinely felt that people who only code will be eliminated. We need to shift our heads to what humans should actually be doing, or we're in trouble — I've been spreading this message to the team.

What humans should do, mainly: risk management, preventing quality degradation, and accountability.

I'm aiming for one-shot LGTM, and actually it often does work as one-shot LGTM. But I'd never trust that for a production release, and yet doing code review becomes a bottleneck. How far do we trust it, where does responsibility sit, what bottlenecks are acceptable — that's what we're discussing.

Raising Task Resolution is the Human's Job

Then there's setting security guards to prevent AI from going rogue, prompt design, model pinning.

And: if task resolution is fuzzy, AI can't implement it either. Just like with humans. On top of the standard specs the PM hands down, someone who knows the state of the code has to write up a proper tech spec with details, then advance the status and throw it to AI. The theme has become: humans need to build it up at high resolution.

The act of creating tasks yourself, raising the resolution, nailing down the fuzzy parts — this is going to be required across all roles.

Even With All This Automation, I'm Still Busy

I'm not really struggling with anything specific. But even with all this automation and AI efficiency, I'm still busy.

That's both interesting and a little troubling. When am I actually going to get to rest? is a real question. But there's still plenty of room to push, so I'm setting up the environment so humans can prioritize the most valuable work.

Money

Portfolio Unchanged, US Stocks Climbing Out of the Red

Portfolio hasn't really changed. But US stocks are gradually moving from negative back toward positive, so my P&L is in a much better place mentally.

It's still April, so I'll just take it slow over the year.

Paid Note Project: Still Going Smoothly

The paid note project went smoothly this week too. Polishing it up day by day.

Duolingo 106-Day Streak, But Study Time is Slipping

106 consecutive days of Duolingo. The ranks have been going up and now there are reading bits where I'm like "I have no idea what this means" and listening bits where I'm like "huh?" I'm just doing whatever little I can every single day.

For slow, simple short sentences, I can actually catch what foreign English speakers say on YouTube. My goal is to be able to catch an entire video, so I'm rewatching the same ones repeatedly.

I've also been doing a fair amount of AI phone calls, so output is happening too.

That said, my study time has been slipping compared to a few months ago. I want to get back the even-just-5-more-minutes habit.

Closing

The work breakthrough was the big one this week.

A world where tasks become PRs in 10 minutes. Hard to believe we got here. But at the same time, the urgency to raise the resolution of what humans should do has gotten really real. Jobs that are just writing code are genuinely approaching their end.

Training is going well too: deadlift 120kg, bodyweight 76kg, chest dramatically changed. The Big 3-only strategy was right.

The only thing completely untouched is quitting smoking. The only honest thing to write is "I just don't feel like quitting right now." Maybe I just have to wait for the moment to be ripe (excuse).

For next week, I want to take care of my physical condition properly first. To organize what I accomplished this week, I need to keep the foundation of my body in shape.

For work, most of the dev automation is in place, so I'm moving into the polish phase to push the precision. The next step is in my head, and there are several other companies who've already done this, so I want to use them as references and push the team and company's dev environment to a higher-throughput state.