Posts

Here’s a new project I built. Log in with GitHub (read-only) and it’ll tell you what percentage of your commits were co-authored with AI.

I’m at 32% over the last year (though this is slightly undercounting, since Codex doesn’t add the Co-Authored-By trailer to commit messages). Try it and let me know what you’re at!

It’s a strange time to be a software engineer. We’re speedrunning a technical revolution that transforms our industry from one of craftsmanship to mass production and cheap code. This is painful to those who, like me, identified with the art and elegance of programming, and now have to reckon with the fact that we’re no longer artists but just people who type for money.

Current has no unread count. Not because I forgot to add one, or because I thought it would look cleaner without it. There is no count because counting was the problem.

The main screen is a river. Not a river that moves on its own. You’re not watching content drift past like a screensaver. It’s a river in the sense that matters: content arrives, lingers for a time, and then fades away.

New RSS reader from Terry Godier. This was an instant purchase for me. I’d been considering prompting my way to an RSS reader that worked just the way I want, but this is far more intentional than anything I could’ve come up with.

I love RSS feeds, but more and more often I come across blogs that don’t offer one. Rather than go all old-man-yells-at-cloud about it, I built a small tool that gives me all the RSS feeds my heart desires.

This post uses Jonathan Haidt’s elephant/rider framework: the elephant is the hedonistic, reward-seeking id, and the rider is the rational ego/superego that guides it.

It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.

Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.

It’s a very good post and well worth reading. I subscribed to the author’s RSS feed!