been collaborating with a lot of folks on getting started with AI. you need to be a hermit at first. ask it all your kooky questions. let it spin up prototypes that will never make it off your computer. try to get it to fail. then ask humans for help: see how they use it for everyday tasks, mod the config, understand that we're just passing around glorified text files. it's not as complicated as you think to be good. but nothing here is solved. i'm outing anyone selling "here's what you gotta do" as a magician. guilty. fine. but these spells are actually real, and my 7 year old can do it.

i'm allergic to certainty. if i think i have anything figured out now, i'm sure later will rock bottom me. so i try and sit in the discomfort, get comfortable in the uncertainty. whether or not this is all a dream. whether or not i can prove i have hobbies, that i touch grass. like am i really awake right now? just enjoy the ride knowing you can't know where it's going.

last week, i made my websites load in under 400ms. cleaned house. swept SEO (plus the other two acronyms no one can actually agree on), scrubbed the dried code off the counter, and looked at shades of gold until i died of old age. it is truly fast ⚡️ faster than it needs to be. so obviously i'm avoiding something. the real hard part is asking people if they want to work with me, knowing they might tell me to kick rocks. much easier to clean a house than host in it, even though we know the party's worth the trouble.

i always uncheck "share my data" when i try out a new LLM. cannot have these models getting trained on my fat fingers.

i used to pay for code with prompts. the same garbage exchange rate of tabbing into the browser, asking a question, copying the result in and the errors out. obviously super cool at the time, but obviously not cool every time. now i get the round trip in a slash command. am i saving time? sure. am i saving attention? more sure, and more important. every shortcut i find is a tax i get to ignore. forever.

babysitting agents in the dark is a recipe for burnout. the last few months i was the new guy in every department — ops, marketing, finance. each a whole job i knew next to nothing about on monday, downloaded straight into my brain and released by friday. no boundaries. i said yes to everything, so thirsty for knowledge i ignored that drowning was a thing. started dreading the next "can you look at a little project i've been working on." sure, add it to the synaptic soup of broken context. the low point was easily a unified sales dashboard. it juiced the last of my engineering confidence and left a strange residue in its place — it's not gonna get worse than this. then more daylight. i have the whole puzzle, all the pieces roughly placed. now i get to let everything i had no business absorbing that fast compound, slow and bright ✨

i used to just be really good at Google. that was at least half the job. crash into an error and trawl the internet until a decade-old thread and some duct tape made me feel like a genius. riding the dopamine until the fix, until the next crash, repeat. i would be confident in what i built because i had the bruises as proof. but now the tide often stops at the first search. we lost the pain, and probably the high with it. though i wouldn't say i hate it. feels less like drowning in the surf, and more like orchestrating the waves.

farmers are the backbone of civilization; context farming is about to become the backbone of human knowledge. in calls, i go down every rabbit hole, ask every question, knowing the transcript is a future feast. but i capture everything now: - screenshots, so many screenshots. - half-baked twilight thoughts. - links i'll never reread. - the whole spreadsheet, all of it. each morning i ask an agent to hit the fields and harvest, always surprised by the bounty. these seeds are heirloom, and any farmer worth their salt wouldn't let them go to waste.

i've been on the internet since i was 10. i'm 35. don't think i've ever actually tried to be seen. wrote things, didn't publish. built things, didn't talk about them. but i realize the only thing that compounds with waiting is anxiety. so this has been the first full week of me posting. i started. and i don't know what i'm doing. but at 35, i know better than to feel bad on purpose. ✌️

anyone else tab switching like a lunatic? a year ago, solving any problem was an instant and enormous dopamine hit. now i've got 20 sub-agents running the labyrinth on four different problems. they all land eventually — some in thirty seconds, some after recursive rounds of self correction. none of them are blocked except when they demand my attention. so i'm the bottleneck. the river delta congregating disparate streams of tokens. feeling like the new skill is focus but distributed. flow state with ten more windows.

domain experts can build with AI but can they ship? 🚢💨 not without the last mile. i'm onboarding folks who in their first week fire 30k lines out of a cannon before fully understanding what a PR is. what they can't do is the part that turns "it works on my machine" into "it lives in a codebase without busting the next person's vibes." merge conflicts. design system drift. security review. the test suite. the guardrails we set up for Claude's next battle. am i a code-review bot? a Claude whisperer? more like a reformed control freak helping a startup's internals survive five non-engineers shipping multiple times a day. whatever we call that now, it's the job.

a 1:1 port of threesam.com from Next.js to SvelteKit. the impulse, the experiment, what the numbers showed.

i've been coding for about how long i've been a dad, 8 years. i've been using AI seriously for 8 months. some days i feel like i'm running circles around me a year ago. some days things get launched that i wouldn't have even swung on. other days i feel like i'm playing pretend, like the fire i've been given will burn out just as quick as it started. maybe. but whatever's happening is too new for anyone to actually feel like they belong, so just keep shipping until the doubt fades to noise. ✌️

rules people have to hold in their head rarely transfer to their hands. i want to go fast. i want my team to go fast. and i want to scale — not spend my productivity gains policing standards after the fact. so i flipped every type to strict. every lint rule to error. every function necessary and tested. in practice, three Claude agents (and me) cleared 320 violations in 10 minutes, validated in 20. the kind of "nice to have" that i never would have gotten around to. a dark factory should have neon guardrails.

rules people have to hold in their head rarely transfer to their hands. i want to go fast. i want my team to go fast. and i want to scale — not spend my productivity gains policing standards after the fact. so i flipped every type to strict. every lint rule to error. every function necessary and tested. in practice, three Claude agents (and me) cleared 320 violations in 10 minutes, validated in 20. the kind of "nice to have" that i never would have gotten around to. a dark factory should have neon guardrails.

everyone's looking for 10x productivity in the wrong seat. it's not your engineers. the pairing nobody's measuring: a domain expert — ops lead, finance analyst, growth marketer, founder — driving agents, and an engineer supervising the diff. process can't be an afterthought and documentation is key infrastructure. pair programming takes on a new meaning.

synaptic slop. 5x productive. 5x less fulfilled. i let claude do the things i used to do myself. the context window remembers what i was building. i don't. paid for the destination with the journey. not sure that math is mathing.