Adam Keys is Thinking

This is a fancier way of saying that it’s unfortunate that naps don’t make one feel more energetic afterward:

So, if you read through the Philokalia, it is very common to find the same author alternating between talking of thoughts (logismoi here referring to negative, vicious thoughts that could lead you astray) and demons. Acedia, the vice of listlessness and despondency, is called, for instance, ‘the noonday demon.’ Sometimes it is treated as an internal struggle; other times it reads as if a personified demon is the cause of these temptations; if Graiver is right, then these are merely two ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the same phenomenon.

— Jared Henderson, Asceticism of the Mind

I give them grief, but I do love afternoon naps.

💤 Midday disappointments:

• A dip in energy is not fixable by napping, and napping does not restore one’s energy
• A superb nap is restorative, but difficult to predict or consistently generate
• A short nap might make you feel better, but rarely more energetic
• Coffee after a certain hour is contrary to sustainable energy and really only papers over the problem

The problem with liking anything besides “ahead of their time” musical groups from the 90s like Radiohead or Wu-Tang Clan:

1. Everyone who was a teenager in the 90s has one or two favorite bands or albums that they hold dearly and honestly.
2. The problem is, basically every musical group from that era has its legitimate detractors.
3. Thus, 90s kids will have to defend their choice to others for the rest of their known lives.

(Mine are Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus, and Rollins Band. 🤘🏻🤷🏻‍♂️)

Yesterday I coded with only my wits for the first time in a while. It was pretty great. Not quick, but educational. Not efficient, but full of that great feeling when challenges are tackled with one’s own intelligence and experience. Do recommend.

Coding agents create an opportunity for shorter coding times, faster iteration, and shorter feedback loops. That opportunity is wasted if we don’t solve for all the reasons a software project can go sideways that aren’t “we couldn’t type fast enough”.

“Lowering the cost of writing code was the thing that no engineering leader asked for, but it’s the thing we got.”

— Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Vibe Coding for Teams, Thoughts to Date

“The last part: once you’ve created a situation where failure is safe … you need to be prepared to let failure happen.”

— Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Make Failure A (Safe) Option

If teams are (still) afraid to slip a deadline, accidentally ship a bug, or cause an unforeseen performance problem, there’s still a problem. All the LLMs and coding agents in the world won’t fix it for you.

The more failure is a socially acceptable reality and tool-supported via feature flags, fast rollbacks, observability, blue-green releases, etc. the better your team will operate. A small part of this is building better tooling for detecting, recovering, and remediating surprises. The majority of the effort is in leaders supporting the team and the team supporting each other in stressful times. 🧠

Computers are also free to be weird:

I’m a programmer. You’re probably a programmer. We think in systems, deterministic workflows, and abstractions. What’s more natural for us than viewing LLMs as an extremely slow kind of unreliable computer that we program with natural language?

This is a weird form of metaprogramming: we write “code” in the form of prompts that execute on the LLM to produce the actual code that runs on real CPUs.

— Mario Zechner, Taming agentic engineering - Prompts are code, .json/.md files are state

This workflow, for tedious porting of animation engine code to many languages and targets, has a lot of human-in-the-loop affordances. If I were a betting man, I’d wager on human supervision entering the lexicon as context engineering and vibe coding fade in the hype cycle.

A thing about homeownership is that every room is a workshop until it becomes whatever room it’s going to be.

This seems to hold for brand-new homes and old homes. Sometimes, for rooms you’ve been using one way for years, and now you want to use them for a different purpose. Or, because you suddenly get intensely bored with their current layout.

It’s unfortunate, but true, we can’t sensibly integrate all the great productivity tools out there into our workflows.

I wish I could find a way to put Bike, Antinote, and Agenda into my (daily) workflows. 🤷‍♂️

Systems expansive enough to warrant a course, discussion forum, or orthodoxy may not solve your problem.

I was thinking of knowledge management systems when I wrote this down. But it’s probably more broadly true than just organizing your tasks and notes. 🤔

Related: I Deleted My Second Brain.

I’ve been writing about estimating and planning a lot lately, so this is worth sharing:

Numbers are not the goal. Successful outcomes are.

Those footing the bill would rather have a successful outcome than an excuse to blame the estimator. In exploring better estimation, I’m not looking to protect the estimator or development organization from censure or litigation after a disappointment. Instead, we use estimation to help guide the project to success from the point of view of both those paying for development and those performing it.

— George Dinwiddie, Software Estimation Without Guessing

When I’m feeling lousy about an estimate, it’s usually because I’m treating it like a promise instead of what it actually is: a piece of the puzzle for deciding what to do next.

The tricky bit is setting expectations up front: this estimate is based on what we know today, not what we’ll discover tomorrow. Everyone knows surprises will happen. The estimate should help the team make better decisions when they do, not box them into promises they can’t keep.

The best estimates I’ve given weren’t the most accurate—they were the ones that helped teams navigate uncertainty instead of pretending it away.

Communicating early and often is a great hack, and easy to do:

In the end, write the docs you want to write. If no one reads them, or if readers find they are out of date, then consider not writing them next time. But don’t let anyone shame you into wasting time. The question is not, “Do you have documentation?” but rather, “Do you communicate clearly?”

– Kent Beck The Documentation Tradeoff)

“Write documentation” is a tidy but unsubtle maxim. “Tell people what you did” and “help people use your software for the right thing” are better starts. Of late, “invest in written documentation for onboarding humans and agents” is an even better suggestion.

As long as you’re telling people that your thing exists, here’s when you should use it, and here’s how to use it, your documentation bases are covered.

Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto, Japan:

One of the things I read about while getting ready for our vacation in Japan were these famous tiny businesses: bars or izakayas with four seats, narrow little bookstores or record shops in people’s houses or the bottom floors of small buildings, hyper-specialized or themed bars owned by one passionate guy. (There’s one that’s chock-full of Star Wars memorabilia, for example.)

Ain’t this a friend of the gestalt? I’m daydreaming of how to run a pop-up software and coffee shop in my driveway, whilst somehow steering clear of neighborhood associations and zoning regulations. Maybe more of a lemonade stand than a “shop”. 😉