The explosion of mediocre content created a vacuum for taste, for curation, for a brand that stood for something. When everything is abundant and most of it is forgettable, the scarce thing is discernment.
Abundance creates scarcity. Systems will self-balance over time. I’m doubling down on discernment and taste.
You play. Not hacks. Not prompt engineering courses. You practice the uncomfortable act of sitting with an open-ended tool and no instructions.
Play is the right verb. Everyone I know who is embracing the tools with curiosity is having more fun than we’ve had in a long time. Builders are going to build. The existence of the Sears Tower doesn’t mean you can’t build a lean-to as bushcraft meditation.
This is a more fleshed out version of my reflection that we’re replacing dopamine addiction to scrolling with dopamine addiction to creation. Replacing doom scrolling with doom tabbing. Or doom muxing if you’re into tmux.
There is something seductive about the loop. It simulates progress. It feels like making.
I’d say it feels like progress because it is progress—with the huge qualifier that crappy first drafts are progress. Editing is progress. Good things take iteration. Most of life is sanding.
The contemplative work is what makes the execution productive instead of just fun. Without it, I’m just pulling levers and hoping.
Get out your Cal Newport books and organize your calendar for some deep work and slow productivity. Prompt slow to move fast.
The whole post is worth chewing on. This sentence jumped out, and that’s the tangent I’m following.
They believe it’s too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that’s wisdom or rationalization, I don’t know.
This sentence could be said about many dominant forces throughout history. Religion and fire come to mind.
Religion, loosely defined, often perpetuates a mission that a collective and sincere embrace of a mysterious but knowable superintelligence will usher in heaven on earth. Fire consumes every resource available if it’s not managed or contained. Both create meaning and meet physical needs. LLMs sit at the intersection of both “useful” and “all-consuming.”
Fire is powerful and dangerous. Belief is powerful and dangerous. When contained, we enjoy meaningful rituals in the comfort of climate controlled environments.
What is the HVAC equivalent of an LLM running in a feedback loop? Is this the point in human history where we legislate tolerable belief?
What a wild time to be alive.
He’s making a plan
Vetting it twice
Flibbergitting…
“You’re absolutely right!”
Santa Claude is coding
Your vibes
There is a sea change happening. There’s not enough sugar in the world to make it sweet. Pick a boat, and learn to love navigating the turbulence of changing currents and unpredictable tides. The moon still shines, reflecting light. Our orbit and axis have always been tilted. Seasons come and go. Raw materials renew. If they don’t, so it goes. Learning is additive. Learning is addictive. Learn to love learning. Learn to love living, in its various forms. Learn to love, it’s all that endures.
I woke up at 2:30am this morning. Not because I’m stressed. It’s because I’m excited. I’ve got big kid on Christmas morning energy. That feeling when you have a pretty good idea of what will be under the Christmas tree based on requests, but won’t know until you gather together and unwrap the gifts. Anticipation fulfilled by magic.
Then I learned Santa was my parents. The gifts kept showing up but the magic was gone. My hard earned knowledge about how Christmas worked and how to get on the nice list melted away. I still woke up early, but not quite as early. Comprehensibility made things less meaningful, somehow.
There’s a gap between finding out and becoming. A season where the magic is just gone and nothing replaces it.
Then I had kids. I stay up late assembling bikes. I eat the cookies and drink the milk. I’ve embodied the spirit I’d stopped believing in. The magic gets made by those who show up.
Let’s start with my belief that a manager’s job is to tell you where you are, and a leader’s job is to tell you where you are going.
This is a good place to start. Management and leadership are a venn diagram. The orientation towards presence and futures tracks for me.
transaction costs are collapsing. The activities that used to require organizations can increasingly be performed by individuals with the right tools.
Coherence is a differentiator and is difficult to scale. LLMs can accelerate towards coherence of fragmentation. The transaction costs that justify the formation of companies are disappearing. This was Nobel Prize worthy insight 90 years ago, and unimagined edges of the bell curve are coming into view.
I wrote A Self-Referential Short Story Published on Wikipedia.
George Lucas didnt deserve so much flack for updating published movies when he saw an opportunity to realize his personal vision.
Through a providential overlap of copycat recipes and clearing out leftovers, I just ate Dishoom’s Gunpowder Potatoes with the aioli from Campfire’s broccoli, and I am at peace in this moment.
Here are two pieces of simple advice that make a difference in my work. Things flow smoother when I remember to embrace these rhythms.
A deliberate 18 minutes can keep most work days on track.
At each step, write things down. These notes can be ephemeral and tossed at the end of the day. But the writing is part of the magic.
Be specific about what, when, and where. Visualizing the action in space and time increases the chances of making it real.
I don’t remember where I heard this advice. If you’re familiar, I’d love to give proper attribution.
Take 30 seconds to write down the most important thing after any meeting, conversation, or otherwise significant moment. It can be a few things, but it doesn’t need to be mountains of text.
I remember where I picked this up because I saved the link and the most important pullquote (to me) on my own website.
Don’t create distinct notes for every meeting, conversation, or otherwise significant moment. Just keep a daily append only log as you would on a legal pad. Life is lived linearly and memories are sorted out at rest. Synthesize the daily notes at the end of the week if you must. Only then do you add brief insights to long standing notes representing ongoing commitments and projects
Throw out the daily notes after a while. Or put them on an external hard drive so there’s actually a cost to retrieving them. This will force memory to form about what matters, action to make it meaningful, or both.
Be a human. Use computers. Or pens and paper. Quit fighting the hardware.
I’m noticing a shift as I work with LLMs. I used to manipulate my code as if sculpting angels in the architecture. Each program was a cathedral housing ornate beauty. The code I generate with LLMs is an airport parking structure. Pure utility with the necessary materials.
Both structures have their purpose. Sacred spaces for quiet reflection serve my needs. Protecting my wheel vehicle while I travel in a wing vehicle also meets a need.
I’m witnessing a realtime rebalancing of my values. I’m following curiosity faster. I’m delaying craftsmanship until there’s proof of utility. This is a positive change for me. I tend to get stuck in prematurely predicting what a solution will need rather than attempting to produce a system I want. Yes, code is just another avenue for humans to express and distinguish their wants and needs.
I want infrastructure for making human connection. LLMs for building pipelines feels right. LLMs clogging those pipelines with slop isn’t interesting. And yet, “the medium is the message.” The medium is produced by the statistical average of the next token that should appear. Perhaps it’s modernized as “the mean is the message”—the computed average of logarithmically accelerating messages received is how we interpret the world, and decide what to do next.
Man’s search for meaning (pun intended) should not decline to the mean because of this new mode of operating. Satisfying the search for meaning requires choosing, not averaging. I’m using the means of production to build infrastructure, while keeping the search for meaning for myself. The parking structure exists to get me to the cathedral faster. Maybe the real cathedral was the curiosity I followed along the way.
I’m building this personal website with the help of LLMs. I wrote these words with my own hand using Bear for iOS and Bear for macOS. You long press the dash to insert an em-dash on iOS. You chord option-shift-dash to type an em-dash on macOS. Just because the computer predicts em-dashes too often doesn’t mean it’s not the character I want.
Acceleration of discovery, not delegation of meaning, is the key.
Matt Webb’s idea about agents acting on Reminders inspired me. So I built Thaings.
Thaings adds agentic workers to my to-dos in Things. It’s AI inside of Things. Thaings. You get it.
I’m really proud of the name. It’s a testament to the creative energy I can manifest from pursuing something with a stupid name.
Here’s how it works. I manage my to-dos in Things, same as ever. If there’s ever a to-do that I believe an agent can complete, or at least accelerate, I select the to-do and call an Apple Shortcut. The shortcut broadcasts information about the to-do to my ~/.thaings folder, where an orchestration of scripts communicates receipt by adding the Working tag and begins executing on the to-do. The progress from working is reported back by appending to the to-do’s notes and replacing the Working tag with the Ready tag. I am the human in the loop, so only I decide whether or not it is ready to mark complete. If it’s not quite there yet, I can add more notes and re-broadcast back to Thaings by re-invoking the shortcut.
I’m shelling out to Claude Code under the hood. Which means this only works on macOS. There’s probably a better way to make this generic so the shortcut and it’s side-effects could run across all Apple platforms targeting a plurality of LLMs. The first exploration of this idea was actually completely self contained in a Shortcut. It worked, but completely relied on a one-shot request/response assumption. It would use “Ask Claude” on iOS, and “Execute Shell Script” to call Claude Code on macOS. And even though it worked, seeing all those one shot chats when I opened the Claude app was gross. And even though the platform-dependent branching both returned strings, Shortcuts wouldn’t accept that reality and provide the control flows I wanted.
The invocation of the shortcut with to-dos selected is kinda goofy. I experimented with Things’ “Find Items” action in Shortcuts as the mechanism for finding to-dos within a specific project, with a specific tag, etc. In practice, Shortcuts is paranoid of this interaction that results in sending a bunch of Things data to a shell script. It asks for permissions every time, no matter how many times I select “always allow”. I’ve got a few ideas on ways I can try to code around this. Or maybe leveraging LaunchAgents and AppleScript to potentially rely only on actions within Things, and eliminate the need for the shortcut entirely. That would cement the constraint of working only on macOS.
So that’s Thaings. Is it useful? Maybe. I’ve been able to execute on a few to-dos without leaving Things. Was it fun to build? Heck yeah. Building is the best part.
Use Things and Claude Code and wanna kick the tires? Installation instructions are in README.
Context engineering is the art and science of curating what will go into the limited context window from that constantly evolving universe of possible information.
Sounds a lot like living a life. Choosing what to hold onto and what to discard. We do this all the time.
I started reading Don Quixote. Which mostly makes me excited about rewatching The Newsroom with a new lens for understanding Charlie Skinner.
I’m starting to think language models are a fundamentally manic technology, in part because they operate exclusively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter.
Everyone could benefit from having an Andrew W.K. hype-man by their side every now and then. While exhilarating during show time, operating in a manic state with no regard for steady rhythms is no way to live a complete life.
Are LLMs building a dopamine addiction to creating? It feels better than the dopamine addiction of passively consuming. One produces exhuberance about what’s possible, the other a depression of comparison towards what feels unatainable.
The activities are different. Would an alien species observe that we’ve traded endless scrolling for continual prompting?
Children like seeing how their actions have an impact in the physical world. Now that we live lives on screens, we like seeing how our words have an impact on the constructed reality.
I don’t know about you, I’m feeling forty-two.
“Six seven” multiplied. A product of my generation. The meaning of life in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Statistics tell me I’m closer to my death than my birth. I don’t love that stat, but I accept the premise.
In the time I do have, I’ll keep up the trend line from thiry-six, thirty-nine, and forty. Here’s some things I believe to be true, today.