The kids are going to be alright

5 things worth sharing this week

I’m really digging this model of listicles. Though I enjoy the daily articles I’m writing, and won’t stop, this offers an outlet to slowly digest writing from others and provide thoughts. If you like this let me know. Always looking for feedback!

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive. 

In my experience, AI delivers rare, short bursts of 10-100x productivity. When I have AI write me a custom ESLint rule in a few minutes, which would have taken hours of documentation surfing and tutorials otherwise, that's a genuine order of magnitude time and effort improvement. Moments like this do happen with AI. Many career non-coders have felt the magic in the first few days after spinning an app up with Lovable.

Colton lays out all the problems with expecting AI to 10x the output of a great developer. A really insightful piece on whether AI is capable of doing that on a step change level. I pulled out the first quote most relevant to me.

As a non-engineer it’s something I’ve been wondering. As a product person it’s been something I’ve tried. 

But the idea that I—years removed from my ability to truly touch and feel all the code I write—can get a small app, feature, or tweak off the ground on my own is enchanting. I can’t stop thinking about it. 

Saadia and I have been arguing about whether vibe coding should happen in production environments. And I think this point underscores how I’ve felt about it all. I want to create, I want to get ideas into the world. And AI tools are opening a path that felt impossible up to this point. 

No. It's okay to sacrifice some productivity to make work enjoyable. More than okay, it's essential in our field. If you force yourself to work in a way you hate, you're just going to burn out. Only so much of coding is writing code, the rest is solving problems, doing system design, reasoning about abstractions, and interfacing with other humans. You are better at all those things when you feel good. It's okay to feel pride in your work and appreciate the craft. Over the long term your codebase will benefit from it.

We’ll see how this quote bears out over time. I want it to be true. 

Winner’s don’t use ChatGPT

I'm sure everyone here has turned to a gaming walkthough in a moment of frustration. Ah! So that's where the key was hidden! Onwards! But once you've popped the walkthough cherry, how tempting is it to go back for just one more hit? Only a quick glance… And then, before you know it, you're no longer playing a game; you're watching a movie. You don't achieve anything by following a walkthrough, do you? You're little more than a monkey pressing the buttons in the order they flash.

This is an interesting comparison. It of course makes me think of the testing I’ve been doing with Claude Code, and where that all fits in. Am I cheating by using an LLM to help me create an app—especially when I’ve fallen behind in knowing how to manually create software like this from the ground up? 

Prompt engineer your way to launching a killer app without knowing how to code. No work necessary to accomplish anything. Click the cheat button and off you go! Amazing! You'd press it repeatedly, right?

There’s a difference between cheating, and having support. Take gaming. I’m a husband and dad of two. I love to play video games, but the times I do are limited. I might have 30-60 minutes in an evening to do something fun; and more often than not lately I’ve been turning to Kindle to dive into a great book before bed (thanks Austin!)

So, when I do have time to play a video game, my approach is a bit nuanced. Take Breath of the Wild. I wanted to play through it a few years ago, and set out on adventures night after night diving through the world. At some point I got stuck on the temple puzzles. 

I tried gritting my teeth and just getting through it—but frankly I’d still be there, years later if I stuck to that method. So I tried my best to figure it out, and then started looking for help to get through the mazes.

Does that mean I had a pure experience? No. But I’m an old man trying to catch a tiny glimpse of my childhood—and frankly having just as much fun as if I was able to play it through on my own. 

So back to LLMs. No, I don’t want to remove my thinking and my ability to wrestle through problems. But in some cases, I think it’s perfectly fine to pull up ChatGPT and use it to help get through puzzles, especially when I ask it to interview me. 

Reasons why a paper notebook is better than an iPad

I’ve been so busy and overwhelmed lately I’ve hit the point of stopping. That means stopping doing everything apart from my day job. I’ve been trying to use an iPad Mini to organise myself but I’m running into issues…

I was recently working with a colleague, sketching out ideas on iPad, and taking notes on my iPad. 

When his turn came to take some notes, he grabbed a paper and pen—and was able to properly convey his idea using a tool with zero distractions.

I’ve gotten used to all the messiness that comes with using a digital drawing device; and sometimes I think I'm just a bit immune to the friction. Opening the iPad, naming Freeform files, juggling with the Apple Pencil Pro trying to open the wrong context menu, disabling dumb popups when they appear (stop with the `select all` when I touch the screen!). I wrestle through the distractions because of the benefit of the power tools I’ve learned. 

But when you need to convey ideas easily, without any technical glitches, a pen or pencil in hand, with paper, is the ultimately tool. 

Electric bikes might just be the healthiest thing to ever happen to teenagers

We’re long past the point where electric bikes were seen as just a trend. At this stage, they’re clearly transforming the way we get around. And perhaps nowhere is that transformation more impactful than among America’s youth. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that electric bikes might be the healthiest thing to happen to American teens in a generation.

I was in Manhattan last week, and the ship has sailed. E-bikes, everywhere. People zippin around town, living life. Running errands, working jobs, moving quickly between locations. Some pedalling, most just moving along. It’s no longer novel, just a thing. Now, if we could come up with a helmet that doesn’t look dumb, we might encourage more people to wear them. 

Also, way less scooters. I think I saw two. 

In Idaho e-bikes have also appeared all over the place, just not to the ubiquitous level I saw in NYC. I see people of all types out on bike paths, living life, enjoying nature. Some of these folks would have a harder time on a standard bike.

I applaud the shift. 

The angle I hadn’t considered was teen independence. What a gift! As a kid I had so much freedom that's often missing with kids today. My brothers and I would dissappear into the woods for hours, only coming home when it got dark. We’d bike around on city streets, with autonomy to just get outside and move. That freedom has all but disappeared for kids across the country today.

Another big benefit? E-bikes give teens independence without needing a car. That’s something we haven’t seen in decades. Car culture has long been the default in America, but it’s slowly starting to loosen its grip. Teen driver’s license rates have been dropping for years, with many Gen Z teens either delaying getting licensed or skipping it altogether. Some of that has to do with cost and access, but some of it is because young people are simply finding other ways to get around.

Cars are expensive. They’ve become more so than ever before. An e-bike is a stop gap. 

I was gifted a used sedan by my grandparents at 16, and that opened up the world even further. It created opportunity for work, living life, building connections, having even more independence. If e-bikes are a stop gap in a world where the costs of vehicles is too much, then I welcome it. 

Finding the difficult work

When new technology shows up, some people ask, “how can this make my job easier?” But what happens if we ask, “how can I use this to do something really hard?”

A different take on the whole—run with AI as fast as you can to do the quickest things. Sometimes going the opposite direction is what we’re yearning for, what provides meaning in our lives. 

With writing, the thing I don’t want to write—that I’m avoiding and looking for ways to escape—that’s exactly what I should put to page.