the snail shell


Things on My Mind

I’m sick this weekend, which means paradoxically an easier time than most today, because T is watching our kid. Time to blog

fighting the gods

There’s a movie called the Odyssey, and for once T and I finally saw The Current Movie while it was new in theaters. It’s very good! One bit that stuck with me was when Calypso says “you have to stop fighting the gods if you want to get back home.” As that’s what Odysseus has been doing this whole time. I get it, Odysseus. I want to fight the gods - not out of pride, but anger. How could you all do this to us?

resentment

Resentment as responsibility gone rotten: “resentment comes from taking responsibility for something you shouldn’t, or not taking responsibility for something you should.” Post is about relationships and reality TV no less, but it made me think about: is Odysseus’s (… my?) resentment the same thing?

fully formed emotional product

I was expressing a feeling to someone, and cutting it off partway - something like “oh god things feel awful - well y’know not that awful - I mean it could be much worse” and they were like:

“You know, while you’re expressing a feeling, it doesn’t have to be fully formed. I’m not here to attack you. You can say e.g. ‘I’m the most cursed person to ever exist’, knowing that eventually, you’ll get through it and the fully formed logical thought will be something like ’that was a rough day.’”

People say “you have to feel your feelings or they’ll just lurk and subconsciously control you” and I say “ok, how do you do that??” and I think this is one piece of that “how”. One way you can “feel a feeling” is to express it to someone. And to express a feeling, you have to be willing to express it as it is, not just the fully formed emotional product at the end of the process.

omelas

why? man this is the stuff of Internet Discourse and I’m getting sucked in but I’m allowed because I’m sick.

Omelas, Je T’aime: Of course we can’t think straight about Omelas, because it’s a completely unnatural thought experiment. Would you trade your city for Omelas? Yes: there’s way more than one kid-in-a-hole in any modern city, we should be delighted for the suffering to be so low! No: but we don’t tolerate or condone that, we are always striving for the no-kids-in-holes city. Arghh how do we reconcile these– well, look, we don’t have to, because you can’t pick Omelas. There’s no “suffering kids -> prosperity” machine IRL, Omelas is just a fucked up little trolley problem.

But you all are missing the point! (In my opinion. Of this open-ended story with many points.) The point is “why can’t we even believe in nice things.” Le Guin sets up this utopia and then is like “but you don’t believe me, do you? sigh fine, here’s a suffering kid, do you believe it now?” Why can’t we believe in good things? Relevant SMBC - “By Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.”

(Possible counterpoint: sure we can believe in nice things, but not in the form of a story. We set up stories to have conflict or something. Being Ursula Le Guin and writing “here’s a nice city” is like a metal band with the metal band font and faces painted and dressing like Slipknot, singing “I love you, you love me” - you’re probably not just going to leave it as that.)

(Possible counter-counterpoint: if this is how all our art is, by Zorcrom, it is bad to be human.)

one feelings hack

If you find yourself saying “for the rest of my life”, you can just not.1 Even if it’s correct, it’s not a thought pattern that is gonna lead you to happiness. I like this because it’s so concrete; those words can be a tripwire. (I have not tried this yet.)

  1. tweet from @visakanv: ime i’ve found that people saying “gonna have to ___ for the rest of my life” is reliably correlated with despondence. and this is a pattern of thought that I’ve seen people learn to relinquish, which led to more presence and joy (even with negative thoughts and feelings!) ↩︎



Number Go Up Races

Things that seem related:

in art

in real life

It’s hard to keep wonder alive. In anything. So in art we go for exponential numbers, or new colors, or convoluted backstories about how our hero is in real jeopardy from the REAL big bad now. In life… I don’t know, it’s messier2. But as things get more exponential, I guess we’ll see this more and more.

  1. tweet from __alpoge__: hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)” ↩︎

  2. no pun intended ↩︎



The Age of Autism is over; the Age of ADHD has begun

Trigger warning: AI hype and worries. sorry everyone

It’s been about 9 months since I’ve been Claude Coding, and 6 since it’s been my primary mode of coding. That is, “open a terminal, tell Claude what I want to do, let it whirr away for minutes.” In early 2025 I was using Cursor to pretty good effect, writing my PRs and asking it for help on parts of it. And if Cursor was all we got, it’d still be a productivity doubler or more. But Claude Code has made coding qualitatively different. This has given me lots of feelings. In this post, I try to sort them out.

first, my preferences

Here’s what I like about making software:

  1. Puzzle-solving: “I need this part of the app to do x. But that’s tricky; how do I do it and make it fast?”
  2. Creating: wanting a thing, then seeing it exist in the world
  3. Organizing: closing all the tickets, organizing all the files, putting all the bits and bytes exactly where they should go
  4. Learning: how to make new things. Whether it’s about my current project or software in general: “how have these tools, that I’ve been using/importing/depending on, been working all these years?”

personally, this rules

It is so much more fun to work on side projects these days. Side projects always have a balance between A. the excitement of having a thing in the world that you want to exist, and B. the pain having to look up API documentation and all the other grunt work. If A > B, the project happens, but usually B > A and it doesn’t. Nowadays, B is almost zero.

I hacked together Closeness To Things in a small number of hours. Usually it would take me that many hours just to figure out what geocoders exist, try to compare them, realize there is no one best one that fits all my needs, and get frustrated and quit. Claude just implemented four different ones for me! And three routing engines! And maps and UI buttons and all the annoying little bits. The People loved it.1 I loved it! I have the satisfaction of website out in the world, almost for free!

So, lots more creating joy; that dopamine hit in a day, not a month or year. Puzzle-solving joy has dropped but it wasn’t very high in the first place; when I start a project from scratch, usually the challenges aren’t very interesting. I don’t usually start projects to “improve Traveling Salesman bounds”; usually it’s more like “I wish there was a website that does X.” (Often I will get to an interesting problem, but sometimes all the overhead of setting up tools kills the project before then.

Organizing joy is a mixed bag: LLMs create so much more stuff that it makes me a little twitchy. But they also help me organize it; I recently did some blog migration that went fantastically well and easily. “Find the pictures, put them in this folder, sorted by year, you know, the smart way.” If a task is something I could delegate a high schooler to do, LLMs obviously nail it.

Learning joy also way up. It’s shallower and broader; now I have a sense of the geocoding and routing ecosystem while still not knowing it in detail or being able to implement a geocoder. But that’s something; before this project, I didn’t even have that; without LLMs, I probably would have gotten hung up on the geocoding before ever getting to the routing.

professionally: huh

I think it’s a blessing, but it’s more complicated. Why?

do more business, faster

Imagine you work at Toyota, and your engine supplier ToyEngineCo announces that they’ve created a Double-Good Engine. It’s twice as fast, twice as efficient, twice as everything.2 Is your life better?

Not really. Pretty soon ToyEngineCo is going to sell Double-Good engines to Honda and Ford, or else HonEngineCo and ForEngineCo are going to figure the technology out as well. Then you’re in the same race you were last year, but you’re both putting out products that are twice as good. You can’t start working 20 hour weeks just because you’ve got Double-Good Engines. Your stock options probably go up in the short term, but not in the long term, because everyone will have Double-Good Engines.

Not that I’m trying to do less work; just, you’d think 10x-ing your productivity would make you super rich or successful or something. It doesn’t, because everyone else has 10x-ed too! And 10x-ing everything means you have 10x more files, 10x more features, 10x more projects to keep track of. Organizational joy way down.

I think creative joy has gone up, but it’s hard to say, because professional work never ends. We make a data warehouse; now it’s 10x bigger and better than it would have been without LLMs, but we don’t ever see the one we would have made, so it doesn’t feel like we created a “10x bigger” data warehouse, it just feels like we made the thing we wanted to make, in the time we took. Sometimes I do think about past projects and realize that I’m creating an equivalent much faster, so I feel some extra creative joy, though, so that’s some perspective. It’s not as dramatic as personal projects, though.

Claude’s eaten the meat out of the sandwich

The Decide-Execute-Deliver sandwich
The Decide-Execute-Deliver sandwich, from AI as Normal Technology.

Software involves these 3 tasks: deciding what to do, writing the code, and then delivering it (testing, deploying, maintaining). The middle part costs maybe 10% of what it used to. That’s great if you like the Deciding and Delivering parts, and kind of a bummer if you like the Execute parts.

I did like the Execute parts. I liked writing the code. I certainly can do the Deciding and Delivering, but the Executing was the most fun. I didn’t like writing all the code, so I’m glad to miss the bits where you had to look stuff up, but the parts where you were in flow, edit-test-debugging, that was why I got into software engineering. They’re not completely gone, and they’re often more fun (“Claude move it over there, figure out the CSS” instead of doing it myself), but there’s much less of them. Puzzle-solving joy way down.

upskill quickly

Now, when I’m trying to learn a whole new thing, I have the best learning environment: an expert I can ask, ad nauseam! In this job over the last half year-ish I’ve gone from b2c tech and internal apps to b2b data warehouse platform, and there’s no way I could have learned all that as fast as I have without LLMs. So, learning joy way up.

putting numbers on it

“How much I feel these joys” on an arbitrary 1-10 scale:

projecttype of joypre-LLMwith LLMschange
personalpuzzle-solving32-1
personalcreating396
personalorganizing561
personallearning594
professionalpuzzle-solving72-5
professionalcreating583
professionalorganizing51-4
professionallearning484

I don’t know. The “organizing” hit is real and merging another +3000 PR without thoroughly understanding every bit of code, or pointing an agent at a whole Linear board and saying “let ’er rip” feels scary every day. I feel frazzled by the amount of context switching required by LLM life, and I don’t think we’re ever going back. I wish I had the type of mind that worked well in that kind of “ER doctor” environment.

But I do have more skills, less drudgery and a lot more possibilities, and tbh the time spent programming is probably less frustrating all in all. Problem-solving joy is gone, but creative joy is still there, so I suppose the way to flourish now is to focus on that as much as I can.

  1. link to tweet saying “hey I made a tool if you’re considering moving: Closeness To Things. input the potential home, input all the places you might go to, see where you’ll want to walk and bike, see what that’ll feel like and your average time traveling (green: walk, blue: bike)”. It has 6k likes which is my all time high. ↩︎

  2. I will never stop making car analogies despite knowing very little about cars ↩︎