I was reading [5], this kind of click-baity article, “My Best Senior Engineer Quit Last Month. Her Exit Interview Was Scheduled for Forty Minutes. The Last Five Changed How I Run My Team.” But found myself with a few thoughts, so writing them here. On production fires The author asked the question, If AI wrote every line of code you produced tomorrow, would you still be the person people call when production is on fire? ...
It has been a few months now since I started using agentic tools for projects and I was curious to dip into what is being said on the topic of productivity gains lately. I’ve written about productivity and productivity gains many times pretty casually, and checking out what Yegor Denisov-Blanch has to say on the matter [1,2], I find that measurement is also equally casual, at least from the 2025-Dec to 2026-Jan point of view. His research involves measuring gains using objective judges, while accounting for rework, but it sounds like it is still not feasible to disentangle other confounding factors when trhying to attribute changes in economic value to pure AI tooling. ...
Maybe the overwhelm is just a symptom of the constant pounding of the modern deluge of the infinite or maybe I have a restless mind. Append-only Append-only is a style of a data store where instead of editing anything, you only add a carriage return and write some more. This is useful for software systems that need an audit trail, such as a financial ledger, but I find it can lead to a perpetual unmooring if used for your life. ...
I was reading the LSD book, aka, Leadership and Self deception, and started writing a mini summary. I like the take the authors have that seeing other people up your life as a means to an end is not good, but their approaches to fixing conflicts feel very uphill or one-sided. I agree looking inward seems that your ego gets in the way and that can get you in trouble for a variety of reasons . Anyway. Yes you can only change yourself and you cannot change other people but the ripple effect they describe feels slow. ...
I have been getting into Cate Hall’s book [4], You Can Just Do Things, and I appreciate the discussion on agentic foundation, but it’s just that she means the other agentic than the agentic engineering everyone else is talking about these days.. For Cate, being agentic is from the human perspective about your agency. There is this song, by this dutch band De Staat, “Make Way For the Passenger”, [1] where the music video is a POV of a motorcyclist, riding alongside a few other motorcycling buddies. Then the music crescendos and we see the POV rider gets t-boned by a truck, and wipes out. Then the video rewinds to the beginning, while the music keeps its original forward orientation. The lyrics now are “live fast, die young. THis ride will ride on. This life will die on.” And now, the video direction goes forwards again, and the crescendo plus crash sequence is replayed right until the impact when the screen goes dark. ...
No One Knows Fun anecdote, watching the AI Doc, how I became an Apocoloprimist. (Which btw really is in the samw spirt of film titles for films as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrick and perhaps To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar ). The Director slash interviewer asks everyone what will happen. There is the Existential Risk tribe and the Accelerationist tribe. Also the movie is sponsored by Tristan Harris who is bipartisan here. (Raskin as well). ...
Is decisioncrime the new thoughtcrime? It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. This above is the part of 1984 when Winston Smith begins again to reenter thohght. Decisioncrime I find myself –like many others Im sure– deciding less, by outsourcing them to a SlopBot. I must have written almost these very words many times already here, but now I have a new word for the phenomenon of not being allowed to decide. ...
Hmmm There can often be overwhelm in a day to day, that prevents us from enjoying doing work even if we actually like the work. The secret out-of-office test. I have realized a kind of hack long ago that if i toke a day off, i could open up my computer and work at a more relaxed pace and derive way more joy joy than if other people knew i was working. ...
The floor in our kitchen started getting swollen. Hmm maybe it’s the humidity, I thought? So I turned off this extra humidifier I had running. Okay and I put our big box fan on that too. Another day I wonder that okay if it is next to the dishwasher maybe there is a leak? I unscrew the dish washer floor plate and I see yea it is wet there. I am gaffing around with the insulation ard I realize I can just take it out. And then I see it, wow a gentle water leak at the place that connects to the fresh water. I try to capture the water in different ways. First I use an oven pan that is too big because the floor board has now started to open up once I took out that floor plate, because it was putting pressure on the floor. Okay so I use a smaller oven pan but that is still not ideal because when I try to take it pick it up it is really easy to spill anyway I go between that and little dishes that fill up way too fast. I’m trying to work too so I don’t have time to solve this problem since I’m trying to solve work problems too! I get a spare minute and as I’m realizing it is getting late and my building maintenance request is not going to get looked into today I realize there is a good chance I will still be switching this leak oven pan through the night if I don’t shut the water off. ...
Going back to [1], from writing [2], i think in the conversation between DHH and Lex Fridman, they identify a sweet spot for swarms. Safe side So never using parallel agents, on the one hand, is playing it safe. You work iteratively with one agent on the task at hand. The premise is you likely dont know exactly ehat you want or necessarily what you need, at least when youre in the fog of war. For sure you have your own plan for your project, half in your head, half in markdown and a third half you discussed with others and proceeded to forget 😭. But this is just a plan for your sanity, and would be useless to give to your agent because that would be a fool’s errand. And any way, you are still multitasking, becouse you ore still juggling many commitments, but you are not using multiple harnesses within the scope of any one of them. ...