Death by side quests
I just made a slash command that inserts the current week number in my roam research graph. I type /Week Number and it will replace it by `[[Week 31 2026]]`. It took 1 prompt and less than 5 minutes. I use roam daily and that specific format constantly, and I even learned a bit of roam API so I’m happy I did it.
But I actually forgot what I was planning to do before that.
Since adopting agents, I have done dozens of those small changes, improving my tmux setup, streamlining how I connect to remote machines, switching cloud providers… It’s really fast and convenient to make those changes, and each of them makes me faster, or reclaim a bit of mental bandwidth…
But I finish many days not having shipped what I was supposed to. I’m getting faster at shipping nothing. Which is strange, since I’m constantly working, and constantly thinking about what to work on.
I guess what I’m getting at is that things that used to be the limiting factor have disappeared, but that doesn’t mean limiting factors are gone. They have just shifted somewhere else.
I used to have piles of ideas that I never started because I didn’t have the time. Now I can start them all, and get surprisingly far surprisingly quickly.
But abundance creates its own challenges: I forget about many of them, the ones that remain fight endlessly for attention, and whenever I finally sit down to make progress, another tiny idea will appear. So small, useful and fast to make, it’s irresistible.
… the cost of building internal tools was an immune system… when building took weeks teams looked around first…
AI removed the immune system
https://x.com/gothburz/status/2046575505160225010
With every AI model release @visakanv is proven more right: the limiting factor was never time or brainpower. It's always been about managing your own psychology.
https://x.com/leroydescimes/status/2035705144482861122
Anyway, I was able to finish writing this without fixing any papercuts or creating any new writing system, so I’m going to call it a win.