Don't sleep on `mise`

Don't be a meat proxy

SF might be one of the best examples that there’s a limit to how much power money can buy.

13 years ago, Apple asked a question that hits me harder today than ever: If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? Every day, I see a world flooded with effortless AI slops. I’m realizing that to build something truly great today, you need a level of focus the world has never demanded before. It feels like trying to write a quiet, beautiful song in a room full of loud noise.

When the PR description has 18 paragraphs, 6 headings and a table.

one of the biggest gripes i have about tech (and startups) right now is... everyones trying to build the-everything-solution what i mean is: many startups should be building "features" that can slot in, maybe break out one day. say take all the components you need to make a coding agent work: the IDE, verification layers, sandboxes/vms, security, etc. but instead they're not doing that, and thus no one is achieving any breakout success. they're all just me-toos that dont work that well, and certainly not better than the other persons idea i dont really blame them as you are taught to swing big, and you're somewhat naively convinced you can right now. except whats happening is everyones blindly confident that they've found _the secret sauce_ (100% placebo btw) and they barely ever scratch the surface on average I'd agree with the wisdom that you should aim big, avoid being the feature, but this is an odd domain where the problems - each component - is so uncommonly difficult and valuable that we SHOULD be building those. and thats just in software dev! you see the same thing in how indie developers operate, and in open source, where instead of trying to lego together things to (truly) solve a really big problem, everyones pretending they can vibe code some slop with the way its going we're like six months away from people thinking SQL is too complicated and having their agents invent new graph stores...

gave up on waiting on nikita for the articles fix - part 1 is here part 2 is coming

I think the deeper question is not if one needs to be skilled in the lower level of abstraction (writing code) but how much mastery is needed at that level compared to the higher level of abstraction? There are domains where spending effort on that lower-level skill reaches a point where it has real opportunity cost and diminishing returns compared to spending on the higher-level one. For instance, the most exceptional designers also have some engineering skills, but they aren’t exceptional engineers. Focusing too much on being an amazing engineer would actually take time away from working on being a better designer. Does one become an exceptional software architect by focusing essentially on their system design skills with some basic coding skills or does one become one by being more hands-on? We used to name the former as “ivory tower software architect”. Maybe the same still applies nowadays? I honestly don’t know.

> You must engage directly and continously to experience the essential friction that culminates in expertise (even if it means moving more slowly). Another amazing article by Lars Faye larsfaye.com/articles/ai-cod…

"Writing is thinking" ...so is coding. But when is it more effective to write than to read?

JS fatigue was nothing compared to AI fatigue

this is like when divorced mum & dad fight for the kids affections by giving them endless treats

Like this but understanding what your code is doing