~3 min read I went thru a stage back around 2010 to 2015 or so where I was constantly trying to squeeze more productivity per hour in my life. This has various consequences for me over time, but in general, one of them was not get incredibly more productive. Maybe I got an additional 10-20% more productive in terms of execution. But that's it. I have been reflecting for the past few years in various scribbling I've had over time. But in general, I came down Then around 10 months ago, Claude Code got good enough to let me make all sorts of things and get a productivity high, where I got to make all sorts of wild things I've wanted to make over the years. And in that time of about 3-4 weeks, I rapidly made all sorts of stuff and then on the other side realized how I neither felt good about the experience on the other side nor was anyone's life changed by the things I've made. The following video by Hank Green talks about this same area of productivity vs hard work vs output. It is a bit long. So let me offer up why you should listen to it. He hits on this idea that he seems to produce a lot of things from the outside but to him it doesn't feel like hard work. It feels like service for people he cares about. That framing of service or doing things for other is something that really resonated with me. And it helped me put some words to this whole AI productivity thing. In general, most people aren't using AI to help someone else out. As machines, they're reinforcement trained on making the person sitting at the machine typing into more words want to get doing that thing. They're slightly more elaborate Skinner boxes. In the same way that Tiktok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts function as a single input for passive experiences, coding agents with a human in the loop function primarily as active experiences. You describe want you want and it assures you that it'll get that thing done. Then when it fundamentally misses the ask, but gets closer than you expect the first time of your using it, you feel like "oh, if I just explained myself better, it'll do better" and so you have these elaborate ceremonies you add in. You know what I'm talking about, the classic "make no mistakes" and "add tests". And every time, it feels a little closer than it did before. But even with all of this incremental improvement, you still don't automatically get something that benefits someone else. The thing being made and its experience is primarily being made for you. And there's a lot of empathy and care that needs to be brought to bear about the experience of using the thing your agent made to be useful for another person. And so you realize that the rate of execution and the ability to produce a lot of stuff is not really what anyone has ever needed. Most people just want more time back in their lives to do things they care about that have no ROI to anyone else but themselves. This usually means reading more books or making music or drawing or cooking or sports or dance or writing or photography or hiking. But often, very often, it's about doing those things with other people, because the relationship with other people is the point. — Robert This message is 100% organic human effort, so it will have typos. No, I didn't send it through an LLM to typo check it. It was made with just my fingers and my eyes. |