I have a travellers journal and one of the inserts in that is my messy, unstructured brain dump of thoughts.
The other two are for daily planning and the more structured long term things. Seems to work for me but if I hasn't found something that works, I'd totally be down for a dirt notebook.
I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall.
My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
That's the one, having the chat interface to the side, with really nice support for various resume options and when prompting the CLI it's having reference to the buffer open has been very helpful.
Okay, yup, this line of reasoning has me removing agents from my personal machines. I was enjoying the convenience and waved that internal niggle away with a vague feeling of "they would never exploit this", but you're right, I needed that wake up call.
I would love if a device like this, combined with the zines of old would produce some really creative and interesting shortform content to get folks off smartphones.
I'm trying to think in terms of small wins more and 1 minute spent creating something dumb or doing something not on a phone is 1 less minute creepy, greedy tech bros can extract your data for profit.
Nothing screams being infantilised by your platform more than having to wait 24 hours to be allowed to install software on your own purchased computing devices.
No judgement whatsoever, but for almost everyone they too will think, no big deal you only install software through stores right? Nothing changes for them, in fact they can't conceive of an alternative anymore.
It took ~5 months for anyone to notice and fix something that is obviously wrong at a glance.
How many people saw that page, skimmed it, and thought “good enough”? That feels like a pretty honest reflection of the state of knowledge work right now. Everyone is running at a velocity where quality, craft and care are optional luxuries. Authors don’t have time to write properly, reviewers don’t have time to review properly, and readers don’t have time to read properly.
So we end up shipping documentation that nobody really reads and nobody really owns. The process says “published”, so it’s done.
AI didn’t create this, it just dramatically lowers the cost of producing text and images that look plausible enough to pass a quick skim. If anything it makes the underlying problem worse: more content, less attention, less understanding.
It was already possible to cargo-cult GitFlow by copying the diagram without reading the context. Now we’re cargo-culting diagrams that were generated without understanding in the first place.
If the reality is that we’re too busy to write, review, or read properly, what is the actual function of this documentation beyond being checkbox output?
You should be unbelievably proud of what you've achieved, and it's lovely to be reminded of the amazing things people can accomplish amongst the backdrop of almost deafeningly negative sentiment going around.
Thanks for doing what you do and for sharing your story!
Yeah, I’m not disputing that AI-assisted engineering is a real shift. It obviously is.
My issue is that we’ve now got a million secondary “paradigm shifts” layered on top: agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, prompt DSLs, eval harnesses, routing, memory, tool calling, “autonomous” workflows… all presented like you’re behind if you’re not constantly replatforming your brain.
Even if the end-state is “engineers code less”, the near-term reality for most engineers is still: deliver software, support customers, handle incidents, and now also become competent evaluators of rapidly changing bot stacks. That cognitive tax is brutal.
So yes, follow where the ball is going. I am. I’m just not pretending the current proliferation is anything other than noisy and expensive to keep up with.
The AI fatigue is real, and the cooling-off period is going to hurt. We’re deep into concept overload now. Every week it’s another tool (don’t get me started on Gas Town) confidently claiming to solve… something. “Faster development”, apparently.
Unless you’re already ideologically committed to this space, I don’t see how the average engineer has the energy or motivation to even understand these tools, never mind meaningfully compare them. That’s before you factor in that many of them actively remove the parts of engineering people enjoy, while piling on yet another layer of abstraction, configuration, and cognitive load.
I’m so tired of being told we’re in yet another “paradigm shift”. Tools like Codex can be useful in small doses, but the moment it turns into a sprawling ecosystem of prompts, agents, workflows, and magical thinking, it stops feeling like leverage and starts feeling like self-inflicted complexity.