Wrapping up lil’ document editor “research”, starting to write more on it. In short: cross-platform in the Apple ecosystem is possible, but tricky once you get into third-party libraries. Agent coding makes a lot possible, but doesn’t make anything trivial. Prototypes without a plan for using it regularly, at least in the process of building the thing, are not going to generate useful insight.
False spring has passed in Portland, real spring is coming up soon. Our yard is starting to bloom. I’m fine with trading off an hour of sleep tomorrow for later sunsets.
📚 Iberia / James Michener, Liberation Day / George Saunders
🎧 Jill Scott, To Whom This May Concern. First album of hers I’ve listened to, it is excellent.
📺 Wonder Man, Ponies. The latter is great but somehow over-complicated the season finale.
🎮 Marathon, somewhat surprising to me. But, I’ve played a lot of Halo and entirely too much Destiny, so this tracks.
💻 Amp and Paper are pretty dang good, Claude Opus 4.6 is as good as they all say. I’ve bounced off Cursor, VS Code and its forks just aren’t for me.
✈️ Visited my parents in Dallas, had literally too much Tex-Mex. Happened to sit at the table next to Randy Travis at dinner one night. We rented a new Ford Bronco, and that is a large car. Perfect for Texas highways, though, if you don’t mind the wind noise.
Behind every guitar god there is, literally, a drummer making the odd 7/8 or 5/4 bar sound like 4/4. Paraphrasing Einstein, true guitar gods don’t play at dice or outside of a strict 4/4. (Inspired by: what the heck even is “Black Dog”?)
Squeeze out the trickiest part of the problem, another part of the problem becomes the trickiest. A tale as old as time.
Today, it seems like the biggest opportunities will be in the third of my opening statements. Building systems remains hard. Can I assume you’re familiar with Amdahl’s Law? That’s what’s going on: a massive speed up on a portion of the problem, but as that portion speeds up it becomes less and less of a contributor to the overall speedup. Lowering the costs of the rest of the problem is work that remains to be done. It’s going to take a long time, because the real world is fully of sticky problems, surprising feedback loops, human stubbornness, and the occasional adversary.
– Marc Brooker, You Are Here
You squeeze out coding time, you’re still left with open problems like:
- Running software in isolated, trusted environments (sandboxes) and coordinating work between programs (agents, databases, etc.).
- Human think time, which generates things like taste, and deciding to include this feature instead of that feature because intuition says it will improve the software.
- Coordination and collaboration between humans, which generates recurring meetings (no, thanks) but also great ideas out of nowhere (that’s why we’re here!)
- Verifying what you’ve built and vetting that what you’re proposing to integrate (merge) into the software is any good.
Be careful not to squeeze out the costs that are actually valuable. Otherwise, you might end up with inversions like banks that operate vast airborne transit networks at a loss.
I love when/what Matt Webb builds:
It should be SO EASY to share + collaborate on Markdown text files. The AI world runs on .md files. Yet frictionless Google Docs-style collab is so hard… UNTIL NOW, and how about that for a tease.
We need more “this (thing) should be as easy to collaborate on as Google Docs” sort of things in the world. Granted, I’m not a fan of writing in or using Google Docs! But the collaboration model is right and people know how to use it. May many more bloom.
Contra my optimism on software estimates, some realism:
I gather as much political context as possible before I even look at the code. How much pressure is on this project? Is it a casual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this? What kind of estimate is my management chain looking for? There’s a huge difference between “the CTO really wants this in one week” and “we were looking for work for your team and this seemed like it could fit”.
Ideally, I go to the code with an estimate already in hand. Instead of asking myself “how long would it take to do this”, where “this” could be any one of a hundred different software designs, I ask myself “which approaches could be done in one week?“. – Sean Goedecke, How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
Folks with the best intentions have asked me “How long would this project take? Please say two weeks, that’s how much time we have.” Well maybe I embellished the second part. Point is, too often I interpreted this as asking the question, and not asking for an answer in the time-is-scarce context we were actually operating in.
We often didn’t like the answer. Too much scope cut to fit in their time frame (aka appetite) or not enough detail to decide where to trade scope for time.
In other words, I don’t “break down the work to determine how long it will take”. My management chain already knows how long they want it to take. My job is to figure out the set of software approaches that match that estimate.
Sometimes, you make your coin by delivering exactly what was asked for, sometimes you make it by solving the problem in a novel way. Every so often, you make it by saying no and choosing to do something with better trade-offs.
Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to change, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
You can’t argue with a star!
I went to see an elephant about a birthday.
Dave Rupert, Write about the future you want:
There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better.
Co-signed.