February Notes

The new coding agent from Anthropic is both exciting and terrifying. I immediately wanted to try it, and then realized I’m not touching it until I have my dev environment running from within a VM and off my laptop. If an AI agent can analyze my project codebase and offer to help with all kinds of things, what’s the stop it from just branching out and analyzing my entire computer? There’s no sandbox by default for your laptop, and an AI agent seems like it could be the ultimate malware.

Do I really enjoy the thought of an AI agent giving me dev superpowers? Yes. Do I trust a for profit company to restrict its usage and not mine my laptop for personal information that can be used and sold? Nope.

I’ve found that motivation and routine happen when you ask yourself the right questions instead of the wrong ones.

• Do I want to go swim today? (Yes, you are going swimming today. It’s good for you and you enjoy it.)
• Do I have a clean swim suit? (You packed your gym bag last night, it’s right by the back door.)
• Do I have time to go swimming? (Yes, you blocked out an hour on your calendar when lap swim is open at lunch.)
• What if something comes up at work? (It won’t. You’ve gotten plenty done this morning and set yourself as away on Slack.)

These are all the wrong questions I try to ask myself, each a little opportunity to find some bullshit excuse to sit in my home office and do nothing. Instead I respond to the alarm on my phone that it’s 11:50. It reminds me to slip on shoes, grab my bag, and head to the back door. I’ve had to teach myself to push away all those little questions that are really just the procrastination talking. I asked myself all the right questions last night so it would be easier to ignore all the wrong ones this morning.

It’s so easy to do nothing, never to get started. By the time I’m 100 meters into my swim I’m puzzled how doing nothing could ever have been an option. It’s the act of getting started that matters for me. Just the tiniest bit of momentum, focusing on the immediate next thing, and pushing away all the little questions is what works.

Now more than ever seems like a good time to go on a news diet. The local news in Chicago is bad enough, but the national news is just an unending torrent of depressing and dumb right now. It seems worthwhile to ignore articles, no matter how well written, that are present to not to inform, but to enrage. If no decision or final action has occurred about the federal government, I’m pretty sure I can ignore it. If no vote has occurred, or final rule published, I think I can safely ignore it. The rest is just bluster and posturing that will make me upset.