A couple of months ago there was a minor thinkpiece trend about the push, especially among Silicon Valley types, to be "high agency". It feels somewhat appropriate to be writing this after the hype cycle has passed since I consider myself a fairly low agency person, but I've been chewing on it for a while and figured I should finally write this down. I'm not sure if people are even still talking about it this way or if they've moved on to Marc Andreesen's favorite self-improvement technique - I'm not on Twitter and I largely

A thing people tell you a lot when someone dies is that you need to process it. It was never very clear to me what that actually means. I know everyone meant well but mostly when people told me this, or asked me how I felt, it felt like I had failed some sort of test. There was some process I was supposed to be going through, some new understanding or perspective I was supposed to find, but all I ever really had to say was some variation on "my mom died, it sucks, I'm sad about it." This

Late last year I experienced a period of existential terror about the rise of AI in programming. I did not want to be left behind, unprepared for a world where all code is written by LLMs and the role of a programmer shifts to something more like overseeing an assembly line. So I bit the bullet, plunked down $20 for a Claude Code subscription, and got to work vibecoding away at a few different projects.

My initial work with Claude was pretty mindblowing. I was able to crank out in a day projects that previously would have taken me weeks.