Continuing to dream
we're entering REM sleep
Quick update post here.
Trusting myself is the way
If I really get in touch, I know that my work in this next era is becoming really truthful with myself and with others. Connecting with the deep, moment-to-moment truth of what’s going on - with my body (listening to the signals of physical discomfort and acting skillfully to address), with others (showing up as myself and not cutting off who I am and what I want), and with my ambition (paying attention to the parts of the world that I am actually deeply drawn to).
For each of these I notice there’s an old, cerebral experience and a fresh, embodied one. It takes attention to access the new frame. There are certain words and phrases that are helpful prompts. They are:
“are you cutting yourself off?” (relational)
“you are who you are. imagine others not liking it.” (relational)
“the truth, double down on yourself, and what you’re drawn to” (ambition)
“can you be with that feeling? can you be with the resistance to that feeling?” (body)
I notice that I’m most stressed at work when I don’t actually know what I’m doing and what it’s for. If I don’t believe in the product, and that’s my job and mandate, then I really struggle to be effective. Idk there’s a piece of this here where in bootcamp when I was just kind of coding away at a tic-tac-toe clone, I was pretty happy. But in my roles as a fractional product engineer, I have set an expectation with my clients that I’m staked into the business. And if I don’t feel like I’m meeting that expectation - or I feel like I haven’t communicated what’s going on with them, and we have different understandings of the situation, I feel really distressed.
There are few things I can do in the vein of honesty - one of them is being upfront with my CEO about what challenges I’m facing, and what would help me become more effective. Ultimately it requires a strong faith in my own capability, and a wide field of view.
Often, if I feel like I’m struggling at work, I’ll feel really ashamed and isolate myself, and basically my entire day will be ruined. What’s going on here? What makes it so I 1/ resist updating my partners about a situation, 2/ shut down and isolate myself, 3/ constrict my entire experience around the struggle of the day? Will leave these open for now.
I am interested in LLMs as a translation interface between human- and machine-structured data
There’s an essay here coming very soon.
I am interested in LLMs-as-compiler
Things that are incredibly cool to me that I would like to tinker with and demo:
Compiling a codebase to a dynamic Storybook (Dessn)
Compiling outputs from Claude computer usage to Puppeteer scripts
Compiling reasoning outputs from Claude (computer usage?) into IFTTT scripts
Do I really want to learn design?
You know, I’m kinda like, is this something I want to put time into? It feels like kind of a big journey to embark on and I already have directions I want to nose toward - AI-engineering related ones, making lots of demos with LLMs as compilers, etc. We’ll see if design thrills me enough to put more time toward it.
That said, I was pretty excited by a quote I found skimming through Fractal Tech’s new copies of Graphic Design: The New Basics:
I like a lot the adage that for every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. A problem worthy of the name is seldom accessible to sudden and simple solution. - Malcolm Grear
It gets me thinking… as an engineer I’m making tons of design decisions every day - just badly. I could probably benefit from looking deeper and finding the trickier but more correct solutions. “A problem worthy of the name” - what a beautiful phrase. After all, I do like to solve problems.
Thanks for reading! To live a full life I think we need the ability to joyfully reinvent ourselves closer to our self-essence. Learning this alchemy takes hard work, scheming, and conversations with friends. Subscribe if you’d like to learn with me.