Notes: The Universal Paperclip Clicker

I've been thinking of quitting. Not podcasting exactly, but sleeping. The past six months have been I don't know. I've been doing the least amount of coding that I've ever done in my career as a developer, but also the most. The most lines of code written for sure by by a huge metric, but also the least. I think I've already quit recreational reading to a certain extent, and that can't be good, can it? Like, I I like to read. So today's not a normal episode. There's no, interview. There's no hour long story. This is some field notes, a shorter, rougher, a little bit more personal, trying to, capture a moment in time. Regular episode is on its way, but I've got something I wanna share while it's fresh. And the thing I can't shake is this question. In a moment where expertise has a half life of months and shrinking all the time, what does it mean to learn something, to invest in learning? When everything's churning, how do you know if you're building skills or just spinning? Let me show you what I mean. Right now, I'm in my office. I'm sitting at my standing desk. I have my mic in front of me, and I have multiple Versus Code windows open. And the way I tend to work is my Versus code window is kind of split in two with the IDE stuff on the one side, and then on the other side is a, a terminal with cloud code. And, actually, usually more than one. Right now, I see two. And I have an another Versus code open for agent core demo, then another one for AWS Houston meetup. And it feels incredible because, you know, I'm thinking at whiteboard speed. I'm just describing things and producing the code, describing features, describing edge cases, describing what I want the end state to be, and the system is working to make it real. But it's also chaos. Right? I have many sessions, and I'll hear them stop because I put stop hooks in. So I'll hear Momentum agent stopping, and that means the Momentum agent that was working on my AI running thing fixing the problem where it's handling dates wrong needs some input from me. And then while I'm figuring that out in my ear, Azure workshop, agent stopping. And I'll go over and see what's going on there. And it feels like I'm getting so much done, but it also feels very stressful and, like, I'm not keeping up. Like, I love Lucy with the chocolates on the conveyor belt. So in a way, it feels like productivity. Like, I finally got an intern, a very fast intern that runs twenty four seven. But then there was this moment, this tiny kind of stupid moment I had that made me suspicious. So it was the shower. I had the thought, you know, before I jump in the shower, I might as well …