It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. We’re speedrunning a technical revolution that transforms our industry from one of craftsmanship to mass production and cheap code. This is painful to those who, like me, identified with the art and elegance of programming, and now have to reckon with the fact that we’re no longer artists but just people who type for money.
Read more →Current has no unread count. Not because I forgot to add one, or because I thought it would look cleaner without it. There is no count because counting was the problem.
The main screen is a river. Not a river that moves on its own. You’re not watching content drift past like a screensaver. It’s a river in the sense that matters: content arrives, lingers for a time, and then fades away.
New RSS reader from Terry Godier. This was an instant purchase for me. I’d been considering prompting my way to an RSS reader that worked just the way I want, but this is far more intentional than anything I could’ve come up with.
I love RSS feeds, but more and more often I come across blogs that don’t offer one. Rather than go all old-man-yells-at-cloud about it, I built a small tool that gives me all the RSS feeds my heart desires.
Read more →This post uses Jonathan Haidt’s elephant/rider framework: the elephant is the hedonistic, reward-seeking id, and the rider is the rational ego/superego that guides it.
It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.
Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.
It’s a very good post and well worth reading. I subscribed to the author’s RSS feed!
There appears to be some competition in place to run as many of these agents in parallel with almost no quality control in some circles. And to then use agents to try to create documentation artifacts to regain some confidence of what is actually going on. Except those documents themselves read like slop.
[…]
When I watch someone at 3am, running their tenth parallel agent session, telling me they’ve never been more productive — in that moment I don’t see productivity. I see someone who might need to step away from the machine for a bit. And I wonder how often that someone is me.
This mirrors my impression after learning more about the Ralph loop that everyone’s talking about.
I recommend the normie loop: tell Claude/Codex/whatever what to do, watch what it does and steer as needed, repeat.