Oh goodness gracious. This is gonna be a short one, but it's a thing that's on my mind, and I don't want things on my mind right now. I want things out of my mind and processed.

Hit a bit of vibe coding snag this morning. Gonna actually start forking over USDC because having a machine build software for me, it turns out is extremely I don't want to say addictive. But, uh, sticky? extremely sticky. 
We like sticky.

The issue, though, is when I'm working with the agent and things are going well I don't keep track of project state. Everything feels fine. Until there's an outage. But the point is we have downtime. So now we're in quote unquote offline mode. 
And that's the moment where the lack of project tracking — or context tracking — really slaps you in the belly like a wet fuckin' fish.

I need the means to say to my synthetic code jockey here's where we left off. That work of here's where the project is at... here's sort of the current branch that we're working on and the particular problem that we're trying to solve.
All that sort of status stuff. This is the case for a local agent. Or at least a different agent, right? Because the coding agent goes down for $REASONS and I need some mechanism for capturing the relevant information about where the project sits so that you can pick the ball up when the coding agent comes back online.

That job, of taking the current state as it exists in short-term memory in my head and putting it down on quote unquote paper, is obviously a job for an agent. 
One that should not ever go down, which is to say, should be locally run on whatever metal I have access to. So that it can maintain situation reports and enable us to pick up where we leave off.

So let's lay out the pieces on the board. There's me, as defined by my corporeal form. Then there's entities number, let's say, two through n. Entity two is this agent running on local metal. Which is to say an agent that incurs zero cost.
And we'll call this agent Alice. And then there's entity number two, which is Bob, which is an agent running on top of a paid model.
An external model. And there are tasks where spending dollars on them is worthwhile those that aren't.

The challenge then is
I have to be able to direct work appropriately.

I need Alice to keep track of progress against the overall plan (to say nothing of all the other plans). So when we've finished working with Bob for the day, and a particular piece of work has been completed, we want to make Alice aware of that and have Alice update the planning documents. So that means calling out to GitHub, right? That's a thing that shouldn't require spending dollars on. Whereas the heavier lifting of writing code and refactoring and blah, blah, blah, does feel worth the spend.

And then there are instances where you would want to be able to instruct Alice, or we should say, to give Alice direction. to say: go tell Bob to start working on this and let me know how it goes.

That level of separation is the next challenge. 
We're away from a keyboard and we want to be able to keep Bob working efficiently — to say nothing of Charlize and Daryl and...
Perhaps we can communicate directly to these agents from a telephone. But it's more likely the case where it's easier, from an interface perspective, to communicate to Alice and have Alice turn around and communicate to the team.

Dialing in this dynamic is gonna be necessary for getting the most work done in the shortest length of time.
But now is not that time. Now it's time to get Bob back to work.

Okay it's time for more of this. Time for shitty first drafts and thinking out loud. Last night we had the good fortune to sit down tonight and read some Burkeman. Man, this is a book that I'm gonna read. more than once. I can feel it in my fucking bones.

Tonight's piece touched on... well it puts Steve Jobs and L. Ron Hubbard on the same page. Which if you know anything about Steve Jobs is a totally reasonable thing to do.

But the theme is that everything — I can't help but quote the Steve. I'm a product of my moment in human history — everything you've ever seen, everything that isn't, you know, part of the natural world, everything in the manufactured world that you've ever heard or looked at or laid your hands on. It was made by people who aren't. They aren't magic. They didn't have some special constellation of characteristics that you don't have or aren't capable of cultivating.

As a parent one runs into this all the time: yes darling you can do anything you set your mind to because you're Mommy's gift from the stars. And yet you walk the earth as an adult who's arrived at, you know, whatever station in life you might find yourself. and you're saying things like: oh, well, I'm not, I'm just not any good with maths.

Well the other way to think about these things. The lens that will be a poster I hang on my wall before the year is out. The mantra that's already the lock screen on my phone. The thing I print on t-shirts — because good artists copy, but great artists steal — is this:

You don't lack focus. What you lack is the balls to stay bored and locked in.

Let's take the language example. I'm not good at learning languages. I don't know how to do; it's not a thing I can do. If someone came to you tomorrow and said: I will hand you generational wealth. I will put into your hands the ability for you to not only never sweat paying your bills ever again, but provide you with enough that in the public markets as they exist on planet Earth today, your children won't sweat paying their bills. Your grandchildren won't sweat paying their bills. All that existential dread just evaporates. I can make all that go away. The requirement there is that you must learn another language.

Whether it's learning a language or becoming good at math or putting an art project into the world or any of these things...there's no time limit. The fallacy of I'm not good at math; I can't learn a language; I can't start a business; it's a temporal fallacy. You get to label that goal as impossible because you know that it's not possible to achieve it in within an arbitrary and constrained time frame.

Because of who I am or my circumstances or my environment or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the bottom line is — again, the hypothetical, pick your pick your billionaire lunatic — whomever or whatever represents the unfathomable reward. Are you still convinced that your situation is fucking intractable?

The question is: are you willing to give over as much of your time as it takes to learn the language? If what's on the other side of that effort is everything you want?

This is a powerful idea because what it forces you to do is face down the truth. And I think there are... there are layers of truth within any human being. There's the truth of the sort of Adlerian, or as I like to say, Alderean (every time I read the name Adler I think of the planet Alderan. So that's where I'm fucking coming from). The Alderean truth is this: you lack the courage to put yourself against whatever your goal is, and so you've concocted a narrative that makes the play of the game such that it's not possible for you to attain that goal.

I am bad at learning languages therefore I can't imagine moving abroad. I am bad at math therefore I will never get adequate marks in school. I'm no good with money, or I don't have enough time, or I can't afford to spend my time building my own business that gets me out of being a fucking wage slave.

None of this is said without sympathy. It's not said without compassion. But what this truth says is:

Sugar, your issue is not a lack of capability. Your issue is you're afraid. You lack courage. You lack the courage to say, I'm not gonna watch movies. I'm not gonna listen to podcasts. I'm not gonna surf YouTube. I'm not gonna scroll Instagram. I'm gonna argue the affairs of the day with strangers. I'm not gonna play video games. I'm not gonna see live music. I'm not gonna... Whatever the fuck.

The only thing that's truly standing between where one is today and the manifestation of what one would like the world to reflect is a willingness to push away all of those distractions. To focus on putting one beautiful, delicious fucking foot in front of the other.

Which doesn't mean you can't take breaks. It's okay to say, I'm gonna crank on this thing on Sundays. Or, I'm gonna hit it for two hours first thing every morning, because I'm an early riser, Or I'm gonna put in some extra grind on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Physical training is the ultimate evidence of this truth. No one who has ever developed. a degree of physical fitness that is worthy of respect or admiration or anything... We just had the winter Olympics. Every one of those people was able to arrive at that place, not because they were born with some sort of like lucky hand. That doesn't hurt but it's not a requirement. And it's certainly not sufficient. Again, this goes to the Adler. It's not like they were born and then they spent a bunch of time surfing YouTube and playing video games and, you know, fucking off.

What they did was they said: The achievement of this goal is a thing that is so important to me that I'm going to say no to other shit to make sure that I'm putting in the hours against it. Every day that I wake up, the single most important thing — the thing that gets water and sunlight first — is the pursuit of that goal.

You cannot allow yourself to do damn near anything else with your time, save for basic biological needs, if you haven't put time into whatever the thing is.

Stay bored and locked in, my friends.

Everywhere I look, I see tape with dates from the past.

I... came so, so close to embarking on another procrastination voyage last night, but I stopped myself. And I'm feeling fucking great about it. As some of you may know, I contain multitudes. And as such, last night, I got twisted up in the idea that I needed yet another venue from which to ventilate my consciousness. And that maybe I should start a second blog. That, of course, would require a newsletter functionality, which meant investigating the most cost effective way to put out a newsletter and host those missives on a website and on and on and on. All of this because a very simple and delightful thing happened.

A colleague from my past, who I haven't spoken with in multiple years, just reached out and said, Hey! Your name came up in conversation. Fast forward an hour after that initial message and we wound up spending an hour on the phone. Catching up. Like two human beings. And it was lovely. And then shortly after hanging up and beginning to cook dinner, I channeled my inner @dwr.eth. and wrote: best email?

Because I thought, as I had said to this particular cocksucker, I have... so many interests, and passions, and pursuits, and questions, that I wrestle with. Day in and day out. And yet, these people in my life — they have no evidence. of my process or my passions. If you were to take my state name, punch it into your web querying tool of choice, you wouldn't find anything related to what I've spent days, weeks, months, I'm sure, cumulatively, years of my life exploring and contemplating. And that bothers me.

So much so that I want to get some kind of tool. To send an email to a couple hundred people on a somewhat regular basis. But, of course, as the XKCD would point out, much of what allows our current digital ecosystem to survive, hinges on incredibly small, incredibly brittle. underpinnings. One of those underpaintings being SMTP, which it turns out, is still the way to keep email moving back and forth between earnest human beings, despite it being older than the ottoman empire. but try to send a hundred messages in rapid succession and that ancient tool will cast you into the fires of mount doom. Therefore, you gotta use a different kind of tool, like, you know, a substack. But of course we can't use substack because, you know, reasons.

So, again, all of this bounced around in my head for a good couple of hours, before... my, uh... Before my earnest, well-meaning self grabbed hold of the wheel and said: Ah, ah, ah! You have a project that is occupying — has occupied — a huge chunk of your past attention. One that you are desperate to put into the world. And while your monkey mind is making the case that spinning up this second project will support the first one, the fact is it's better to have the first project, project prime, out in the world already. Which means stay focused.

I did some reasonable amount of work yesterday on that prime project this past week. I think the shape is coming into better focus. My skills continue to feel insufficient, and... I wish that I could farm it out, but, of course, that would defeat the purpose of the entire experience. The good news is, I have at least one person that I can reach out to who I think may have have some expertise or some guidance — to help me with the stage of where the work is, which is great. I'm optimistic (cautiously) that this person will respond both promptly and with something useful to say. But this notion of promptness brings me to another issue.

****

One of my most cherished human beings lamented to me recently that they live and die by their calendar. And that no day is the same. And that their routine is non-existent.

I have feelings, both specific and general. on this front. The specific feeling with this person is. that there's not much evidence of a desire to live by process in how they conduct the rest of their lives. And I observe that as someone who loves process. All my motherfuckers who would gladly eat the same thing for breakfast for the rest of their lives — you know what I'm talking about. The desire to live in this way is something I've never seen this person exhibit. And so it's no surprise that when it comes to the use of digital tools, like a calendar or a text inbox, or voicemails, that there's not — there's not a predisposition to using process.

Instead, what they experience is, the moment their phone lights up with new inbound, they stop everything they're doing. Including, like, operating a vehicle. They will pull over to the side of the road in order to respond promptly for fear of losing the thread. And yet somewhere between responding to that inbound and making a resulting commitment, they routinely wind up with calendar entries that are inaccurate, relative to what was discussed over iMessage (insert massive eye roll emoji here. I fucking hate iMessage). Now, I could make the case, as a dyed in the wool gadget fiend, that a different form of device might help. When I started using the very first Apple Watch, it only took about two weeks, maybe less, before it became immediately clear what the most valuable aspect of that device was — it taught me which things on my phone were truly deserving of interrupting my consciousness with a notification. and which things should actually wait for me to decide to come to them.

And so, there's a case to be made. That this person, whom I love deeply and want the best for, would have an improved experience if, say, they wore something on their body that told them when to shift their attention.

But if they had the tools, would they employ them effectively?