Worry shifts. All driven by desire for simplicity.

If you stop striving, you stop living.

You need counterbalances in your life. Variety. For example, rest feels better after working hard.

Do uncomfortable things. Just small ones. Everyday.

Keep challenging yourself.

Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. Simply foster a desire for people to write content and be read. Arms race to just have their AI's react.

Speed should kill. Need stricter punishment to disincentivize it.

People increasingly automating themselves not only produce a bunch of shitty slop that we need to sift through, but are also influencing how we interact with each other. Trust being eroded.

Platforms and interfaces where text can be submitted need more friction.

More engagement will be the wrong thing to look at if you want a long-term healthy platform.

Need to rate-limit social interactions.

Setup. As short as possible.

Build up. Add tension. That's it. Moment they feel like they know where story is going, attention is gone.

Payoff. The point. Ideally after you've build tension.

What is the moment of maximum uncertainty.

Respect people's attention

What you value. What you're good at. What the world values.

What's a big problem in the world that most people don't care enough about?

What problems do I enjoy solving that most people don't?

Where do I naturally spend my thoughts and energy when left to my own devices?

Take what you value and your strengths and find a job. Or, take your values and talents and look for where the market is underserving the world. In other words, entrepreneurship.

Indifference is giving too many fucks. The the point of being paralyzed by them, so doing nothing is the most comfortable thing to do.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off of his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

Eric Hoffer

Do something. Action is the cause and effect of motivation.

It's not about what you want. It's about what you're willing to suffer for.

Everything has an opportunity cost. You need to love the process, or at least be able to deal with it, if you want the end result.

Good values are evidence-based, constructive, and controllable

Servant leadership

Americans are incredibly rich materially, but impoverished spiritually and communally.

Economics will flourish with AI. More, better, faster, cheaper. But value humans can bring is in question. Where will we derive meaning?

Don't have right institutions for lifelong learning. We front-load formal learning. Can we distribute that better? Can we take a more holistic approach?

We are distracted by consumerism.

We have a peer segregation problem. Social media throws gasoline on this problem. It provides a quick payoff, and discourages us from grappling with problems that take time. And having substantive discussions.

Deliberative republic. Long-term processing of high-value things over lower value immediate things.

There are better titles than your job title. Mom. Dad. Friend.

The center of peoples lives is their family and community. Build out from there.

Wisdom requires us to grapple with our deaths. It forces the truth.

Don't outsource your attention and affection to digital things.

The most important question is what can I do with my time that is important?

What are you willing to tolerate that others aren't?

Passion always begins with play

The more something scares you, the more likely you should be doing it. It tends to be a signal that it's something you want, but are afraid to pursue because you're afraid to fail.

Who cares if your obituary says a bunch of stuff that impresses random people?

If you don't know what your values are, you'll just take on the values and priorities of other people. I largely think this is true. Probably a bad metaphor, but everyone has a meaning void that needs to be filled. Either you can fill it, or someone else will.

We have a need to attach meaning to everything that happens. So we are inventing all sorts of meaning.

Meaning is an arbitrary mental construct, but it's also nature's tool for motivation.

Meaning does not exist outside ourselves. We need to cultivate it. It requires action.

The meaning of life is to create meaning.

Solve problems. Help others.

Goals are good for building motivation, but unless there's a strong why behind them, they end up being arbitrary and empty.

Collaboration with AI is happening too late. Someone plans a bunch of shit with AI, throws a bunch of agents to write the code, and then spits that code out there for a human to review. Which is fucking nuts.

The collaboration should happen during the planning phases. Once that's agreed upon, the agents can write the code relatively quickly, ideally in small enough chunks for humans familiar with the agreed upon plan to review.

This seems to make sense to me, or at least it's better than the current state.

She also makes the assertion that quality will be the distinguishing factor of software moving forward. In other words, craftsmanship. Presumably not in the code itself though. Deciding the right thing to build, a sane architecture, how people will use it. This has always been true, but I think engineers will need to adapt to think at a higher level. I also think quality software will still require that every line of code be reviewed by a knowledgable human. If only to provide a natural bottleneck to ensure that humans can still understand it and to prevent the rapid proliferation of paper cuts.

Related

• Thoughts on slowing the fuck down - Mario Zechner
• Some Things Just Take Time - Armin Ronacher

You need to love your own work before you can expect anyone else to.

People show up for you.

I desperately want to believe this.

Learn to let go when you want control the most. It's a waste of energy.

With the most important things in life, the more you try, the less you get.

Don't use AI to do the work. Ask it to make you better at the things you don't want to do.

Successful and happy people showed up and said yes before they were ready. They just did things to create natural momentum in their lives.

People who suffer most from professional decline are those who are the most accomplished. Those who don't accomplish as much suffer less. Which of these is preferrable? I guess it depends what you're accomplishing.

The decline is inevitable. It's part of life. When you deny it, you're denying yourself part of life.

There are many success curves. You don't need to stay on the same one. Hop between them when convenient.

Synthesizing, teaching, explaining, mentoring. These are things you can get better at as you get older.

Read more books! Especially when you're young. You retain what you do.

Accomplish and serve others. Those are the characteristics of work that bring enduring joy.

If you live for external achievement, deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured.

What if looking inward makes you so much better to others?

What is your core sin? The thing that makes you feel ashamed.

You need to understand your weaknesses and confront them regularly.

We need redemptive assitance from others.

Love decenters the self. It puts you in a state of need that makes it delightful to serve it.

Don't ask what you want from life. Ask what life wants from you.

Suffering introduces you to yourself. It reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

We're all stumbling, and there's joy in mutual stumbling.

Just focus on being better than you used to be.

One of the most measured assessments of coding agents that I've seen and is written by someone who knows their shit (he wrote the pi coding agent, which for better or worse powers OpenClaw).

His point is that agents have limited context, and even with appropriate context, will still make little mistakes that can compound complexity very fast. Humans also make mistakes. But agents can accumulate them much faster. So fast that even the most diligent human reviewer, could never catch them all in a reasonable amount of time. And when those mistakes compound, and a human actually needs to understand and fix them, you're fucked. Or you tell your clanker to add a feature or something, but the codebase has become such a mess, that it can't even figure out how to do it. And you certainly don't understand the codebase well enough to direct it in a meaningful way.

His advice for using agents intelligently?

• tasks can be scoped so the agent doesn't need to understand the full system.
• the agent can evaluate it's own work.
• the output isn't mission critical.
• you just need a rubber duck.

Let the agent do the boring stuff that won't teach you anything. Or help you try out something that would take too long otherwise.

And the main suggestion? The title of the post. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.

Still write code. It introduces friction that helps you learn.

Basically making the argument that the most effective way to get mainline adoption is to create high-quality "building blocks" that others can use to create stuff (think pi-mono or libghostty). Or more specifically, that their agents can use to create stuff.

AI is really good at gluing together high-quality, well-documented, proven components. It also prefers to do this. As do humans, which isn't terribly unexpected. It's just that with humans, there was a barrier to entry in understanding how to put the pieces together.

Positives noted in that article re: "factory artifacts" are interesting. They are essentially more targetted, niche, pieces of software. People can make what they need for themselves, and if you create a building block, that's great.

High-quality applications aren't disappearing. And high-quality applications produced by the developers of the building block aren't disappearing. For most software categories, I think there will always be a majority group that doesn't want personalized slop software and wants a polished, well maintained, and well supported application.