📝 Notes

I’m starting a new project, and I’m struggling with how much of it I should be writing by hand. I feel like a fraud if I use agentic engineering to develop it, but also that’s where the world is going. I think I’m afraid that people will view me as one of the people who vibe-codes a project in a couple prompts and then claims the work as their own. Part of this is deciding to push past the fear of other people’s opinions and just do it. I can choose to build this with care, while also learning the skills that seem to be the next abstraction layer for software engineers. I imagine it must have been pretty intimidating surrendering control to compilers and moving up the stack to higher level languages, so I can take some comfort that this dissonance is a feeling others have felt in the past & made it out the other side.

As a frustrating bonus, I don’t feel like I have time to allow myself to write a new project by hand. There is so much stuff being released, and the pace of AI is blistering, especially when I look at the prolific people who let down their internal guardrails and build like crazy. It feels like I HAVE to choose to develop this new project with AI so I can learn the skills. The more I see being released, I feel this impending rush that I’m not moving fast enough, that each new thing being created is something that I can’t be the one to make. I don’t feel smart enough to make really useful things, so if people nab all the low-hanging fruit, I’m donezo. That’s a zero-sum mentality on top of a scarcity mindset, neither of which feel like a good way to approach AI. We’re in a time of churn, there are no standardized best practices yet, which means there are no wrong ways to be learning right now. Everyone is still figuring things out, and I want that to fill me with hope. Whenever I feel this overwhelming dread, I want to try to toggle myself into curiosity mode instead.

I think I also need a mindset shift in what I consider effort. As it stands, if I didn’t write code by hand and have to struggle & flex my brain muscles, it doesn’t feel like I earned the right to say I built a project. Someone said it well when they compared AI to some sort of slot machine or TikTok, if I use them wrong I feel quite hollow. That’s on me though, because I don’t look at all the cool things Simon Willison is putting out and think “oh he didn’t really build them”. I look to him as one example of the prolific creators I want to emulate.

As someone who struggles to remember anything, I don’t have the luxury of trusting my brain to keep track of it. I’ve been a “docs guy” on every team I’ve ever been on, mainly because I am a sucky colleague asking dumb questions 100 times if I don’t. In the age of LLMs, if you document your application and the history of decisions that have grown it well, you’ll get significantly more useful outputs when working with agents. Context engineering and all that jazz. For people who already have good habits around documentation, they get this bonus for free! Other people will need to learn & strengthen this muscle.

In my experience, it’s always been a challenge to build a culture of documentation at work. People will agree that it sounds useful, but their lack of action speaks louder than their words (ironically the action would also be words, in this case). Even on other teams I worked with, I could see there was often just one hero doing the vast majority of writing up useful docs & keeping old ones up to date.

Fear not! For those docs nerds among us, we now have another arrow in the quiver of reasons to encourage people to contribute. Anecdotally & from skimming online, it seems people are more motivated to document if it helps a robot find answers, than if it would have helped your new-hire Craig. I guess f*ck Craig, but you’ll write up a million words to feed Claude? In this case, we gotta take what we can get.