Show Me You Care
I am unimpressed by artifacts that, even a year ago, were impressive. Websites, apps, 3D renderings, interactive tech designs — anyone with a Claude subscription can churn these out like factory widgets.
If you want my attention, show me you care.
Working More Than Ever
I am working more than ever. As a software engineer using AI, I can attempt more things than ever before, and I am. I’m seeing ambitious coworkers who are doing the same — maybe to an unsustainable degree.
This may be surprising. Isn’t AI the ultimate automation tool and expected to eliminate jobs?
Getting Back in the Zone
In my last post about saying goodbye to coding, I wrote that I have not found how to stay in the zone in this new world. I feel my attention fragmented.
Since then, I have gained some ideas for how to get back into the zone.
Goodbye, Coding
I miss coding.
For about 20 years, I had the joy of problem-solving “by hand” with code. I regularly learned new things that made my code more expressive and easier for other humans to read. I got pretty fast at typing, ~100 WPM. I would come up with ideas for how to solve problems, and pitch these to my coworkers, but sometimes no one got around to the optimizations or improvements. Whenever I could, I would carve out a bit of time to prototype an idea for us to discuss, and sometimes I would harden those ideas into production code.
I lost countless hours quite happily (except when it was part of an incident) debugging code and systems. There were these mysteries where the code you were reading and thought should do A was actually doing B instead, and you would find ways to poke at it and track down the issue. I got better at this with time, too.
Towards an Embodied Life
I sleep better when I am tired from physical things. If I spend too much of my day on a computer, I feel tired in a way that is opposite and inferior to the tired that I feel from doing something physically tiring.
Computers have been a hobby for a long time. I spent hours every day on a computer when I was growing up, trying to learn as much about them as I could – and trying to build cool stuff.
Then they also became my job, in addition to being a hobby. Too much computer time for me!