Brent

A fairly embarrassing development of the past year is that I talk about Atomic Habits a lot now. It's the kind of airport book that I usually sneer at, and it is not what I would call a good book: it's poorly written, it makes a lot of assumptions about my life goals and personal capability that I do not appreciate, and most of the advice in it did not really work for me. I just want to enjoy my life and be able to do things I care about well, and I look to advice books to

Greetings from my second heat wave in as many weeks! Since my last update post I have been extremely busy - I moved into a new apartment, and have also not been home for more than two weeks straight since May.

Things I did

• Cleaned out my mom's old house in WV, finding a lot of fun mementos.
• Moved: arguably this does not count as "done", since we still haven't hung the art and I am still setting up my closet and office, but the new place is at least livable now.

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.