the snail shell


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 ↩︎



Why Isn't There a Healthy Tanning Bed?

Epistemic status: talking with Claude, and some guy’s thread on Twitter.1

The sun gives you cancer, but also nitric oxide and vitamin D2. The benefits of these two probably outweigh the all-cause mortality risks of cancer3, so it’s worth getting regular sun exposure4. But in the winter, in most places including where I live, there’s not enough sun.

My claim: we should be able to fix this with Technology, approximately today. Probably with small tweaks on existing tanning beds. Someone please make this business so I can pay you money.

more background

(Remember my epistemic status here)

The sun produces UVA and UVB light. UVA hitting your skin produces nitric oxide, which lowers your blood pressure. But too much UVA causes skin cancer (melanoma, the bad kind) and skin aging. UVB produces vitamin D, but too much causes sunburn and skin cancer (carcinoma and melanoma). UVA is what I care about here, because vitamin D also comes in a pill.5

UVA is what’s in many tanning beds. People thought it was safe because it doesn’t burn you much without the UVB, but it turns out it still causes cancer and skin aging. So, still don’t go to a tanning salon.

but why not a better tanning bed?

If some amount of UVA is good, it can’t be the case that tanning beds are unilaterally bad! Claude’s explanation is:

To which I say, skill issue. Make a bed that gives you 20 J/cm^2 of UVA at whatever speed is safe! Include a UV sensor that shuts off when you’re done! Hell, include a SAD lamp with more lux while you’re at it. Franchise in every city in Europe and the top half of the US. I would like to be less sad and have lower blood pressure in the winter.

  1. yeah I feel a little weird about this. But I still feel comfortable posting it. I guess it’s because it’s some combination of “just an idea” and can’t be that far off. I guess I should lose a couple credibility points if this is too far wrong. ↩︎

  2. so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not, ↩︎

  3. and here’s where I quote Some Guy On Twitter. Here’s the thread again. But ok he’s a dermatologist at least and abstract-scanning his papers checks out, idk ↩︎

  4. plus, and more to my interests, it may make you less depressed? theoretically that’s visible light but I don’t know, sun good ↩︎

  5. maybe you, like me, remember vaguely “vitamin D pills don’t work”. I think this intuition came from studies where vitamin D pills don’t improve all cause mortality, but sun exposure does. This is because of (among other things) the nitric oxide from UVA! But vitamin D is still worth getting: it helps your body absorb calcium and build bones, and maybe has some anti-autoimmunity effect. ↩︎



Why Hold On To Pain

I have two pressing psychological issues recently:

  1. anxiety
  2. holding on to pain

Anxiety is both macro level1 and micro level. But that’s unsurprising. Holding on to pain is sort of weirder, but I think I recently made a big jump in untangling it.

“Holding on to pain” is what I’m calling it when something bad happens and then I complain about it too much. Complaining happens in real life (if we’ve hung out IRL I have probably complained about parenting; sorry), online (sorry discord friends; I promise I am cycling through multiple venues to get support and yes I’m still complaining this much in our discord; sorry), and internally. Sometimes it’s just one part of me complaining to another part! Sometimes it’s the Innie saying “listen, Outie, you have to remember this! I don’t know why! but you have to!”

This does not seem like a good strategy. It seems designed to, and indeed it does, keep me thinking about whatever painful situation happened and wallowing in a spiral of how I’m such a tragic figure. So why am I doing it?

Simple: it gives me a handicap. If I convince myself and everyone around me that I’m playing life on difficulty level 20, then it’s okay that I’m mostly failing and miserable. If I were on level 1 and still failing, I’d just be embarrassing. If I were on level 1 and unhappy, I’d be ungrateful. But if I’m on level 20 and unhappy, well, of course I am. So: dear self and everyone around me: witness me2, life is so hard for me, see I’m on level 20.

But this is dumb, though. First, everyone who cares about me is supporting me regardless of what level I’m on. Second, … it’s kind of pathetic? I mean, some people go through life with all these excuses for why they’re not Better, and some people just don’t bother with all that, and the latter are happier and more successful and more pleasant etc etc. Third, and this is inspired by a realization last weekend3, I don’t need a certificate proving that I’m playing on level 20 to be Good Enough.

So I’m going to cut it out. After a week it’s a little easier to connect to other sources of comfort than “look how hard life is for me” and it feels healthier. Not that I won’t complain, just perhaps more judiciously. We’ll see how it goes.

  1. about, well… [redacted] and [redacted] ↩︎

  2. gif of a War Boy from Mad Max Fury Road saying “witness me” as he sprays his mouth with chrome ↩︎

  3. not like this is the first time in my life I’ve ever realized this, nor will it be the last. we think about “realizations” like you learn it once and then you’re done, like how to do long division, but when they’re about yourself and your feelings I guess you have to keep learning them. Anyway, it’s good to be reminded. ↩︎