Week 27, 2026 - Music-Evoked Chills, Forward Deployed Engineers, and Buddha Vihar

What I learned

Token Optimization

I noticed two tools this week worth keeping an eye on for the token-cost angle of agent work:

• OmniRoute - free AI gateway with one endpoint for 237+ providers. Relevant for my multi-provider Hermes setup: if it works as advertised, it simplifies provider switching without per-provider config.
• Openclacky - bills itself as “the most token-efficient open-source AI Agent.” Interesting benchmark claim, but I haven’t tested it. Worth watching for the efficiency angle.

Both have the usual caveats: new projects, need real-world testing on multi-step agent traces before I trust them in production.

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

• Now-a-days, this has been a trending job role. I got to know about this role when I was planning to invest on Palantir a few years before. I was fascinated by the role and liked the vision and invested in PLTR.
• For a long time, I just thought engineers now can be divided into two types:
  • Product Engineers, who work on the core product.
  • FDEs who work with Customers to build client specific customization on top of the core product.
• I was working with customers while developing Cognitive Search at Wipro Holmes. I was going to the client’s Wipro ODCs and deploying Cognitive Search in their environment. I thought that is what FDEs do.
• But, FDEs are much more than that. They work like a teammate inside the Client office. They attend standups, give suggestions and coordinate with other teams like they are part of the same company. They become productive from Day-1. Crucially, they don’t just coordinate - they build and configure production systems on-site, shipping real solutions in the client’s own environment.
• They gain enough insider knowledge to be irreplacable. In parallel feeding the product engineers actual ground reality and making products better.

Why an old song can suddenly hit the body

I saw the Awarapan 2 trailer this week and then listened to Tera Mera Rishta after a gap. For a moment I got a strange full-body sensation. Not exactly goosebumps. More like a shiver moving through the body. The second replay did not hit with the same force, which made me curious.

A few things I learned:

• This is close to what researchers call music-evoked chills or aesthetic chills. It does not always need visible goosebumps. It can show up as a wave, shiver, warmth, or internal body sensation.
• Strong music pleasure seems to involve the reward system. Salimpoor et al. found dopamine-related activity during music listening, with the caudate more involved in anticipation and the nucleus accumbens more involved during the peak emotional response.^[1]
• Familiarity matters. Pereira et al. found familiar music activates emotion-related and reward-related brain regions more than unfamiliar music.^[2]
• My working model: after a gap, the song becomes familiar enough to carry memory, but distant enough to regain surprise. That mix of memory, anticipation, and rediscovery creates the body sensation.
• The reason the second replay feels weaker is probably simple: the brain has already refreshed the timing and emotional peak. The first replay is rediscovery. The second replay is confirmation.

The useful sentence for me:

Some songs are not just songs. They are compressed emotional checkpoints. When they return after a long enough gap, the body remembers before the mind explains.

Mahabodhi Buddha Vihar

• I have visited Mahabodhi Buddha Vihar this week.
• This is a place of worship for Buddha. Resident monk students also stay here. On the donation of the devotees the institute runs.
• Every Sunday 5:30 PM a public prayer, meditation class and Dhamma (teaching) events are held.

Skyline of Hyderabad from here. It looks more beautiful in the evening.

Official Birthday

• This week was also my official birthday - the one on record with finance, colleagues, and official conduct.
• I am fortunate to have three birthday celebrations per year.
  • This one, the official one with finance offers, colleagues and all official conduct.
  • Then there will be the actual birthday which I celebrate with my close friends.
  • Finally, based on Hindu calendar tithi my family celebrates.
• The advantage of having three birthdays is that you can plan based on your best interest accordingly and there is less pressure on a single date.

TILs

This week I have posted three TILs(Today I Learned).

Basic Life Support Training

• I received the basic life support training attendee certificate this week.
• The training was organized at work, and I volunteered to attend.
• I learned about first-aid techniques on Cardiac Arrest, Heart Attack, how to give CPR, How to handle Choking, Seizure, Severe Bleeding, etc.
• Around 12 years before, I was also an ERT (Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer of my ODC (Offshore Development Centre) at TCS, Powai, Mumbai.

What failed

Gmail OAuth tokens expired (again)

• Both Gmail tokens for the weekly newsletter digest hit invalid_grant again this week. Happened on Jun 26 and persisted through Friday (Jul 3).
• Had to fall back to web search for newsletter picks. Worked as a backup, but it’s not sustainable.
• Root cause: the token refresh mechanism keeps dying. Needs a fix or re-auth before next Friday.
• This has been a recurring issue - third time in a month.

What I built

Automated weekly note pipeline (blogwatcher + newsletter digest)

The scan → edit → verify → deliver flow is now running daily without manual intervention:

• Blogwatcher scans 44 blogs every morning, picks 4-5 best articles for “From the Web”
• Newsletter digest pulls from web fallback when Gmail tokens are down
• Both write directly into the week’s draft note with ?utm_source=www.soumendrak.com on all URLs
• Link integrity check runs before changes land (sample-checked this week due to cron timeouts)

Disk size issue fix

• Two weeks ago, in Week 25, I mentioned this disk size issue.
• Finally got time to fix the unlimited DB size growing issue on my VPS. The culprits: Hermes, OpenClaw, and Langfuse.
• The issues were:
  • Hermes was storing node_modules, Go, and Rust build files per project.
  • When I upgrade Docker images on Coolify, the stale images were never deleted.
  • Log size was increasing on Hermes and OpenClaw daily - I made them fixed-size and rotating.
• As of now, I have asked my Hermes agent to clean herself every week using a script she prepared.
• I also wrote a reusable safe-by-default disk maintenance script, scripts/coolify-disk-maintenance.sh in my private nini-research repo - dry-run unless --apply, never runs docker volume prune.

Random Thoughts and Quotes

source

• We are on a tight deadline till the frontier model subsidies will be over. Fable will move out of subscription model after two days. This is just the beginning. Early adopters are building skills to use Opus on Fable level capability. However, this will not continue for a long time. Soon, they will go IPO and will run out of subsidies. Open Source Chinese models will rule the market. The priviledged ones will either move to self hosting the LLMs or can afford the subscription, others will have to depend on Govt. subsidies.
• Quote

  Every single thing you do today is something your younger self dreamed of and something your older self will wish they could go back and do. The good old days are happening, right now. – Sahil Bloom

• Quote

  I have realized that some people don’t like you for reasons you don’t know, and they will never reveal that to you. There is no point in trying to understand it. And it’s okay. – Thejesh GN

• Quote

  Observability is Kintsugi for software; making failures visible, learning from them, and building systems that are more resilient because they’ve been broken and repaired with care. – Yours Truely

1. Valorie N. Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience (2011). https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 ↩

2. Carlos Silva Pereira et al., “Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters,” PLOS ONE (2011). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0027241 ↩