Background:
I am right handed.
I spend a lot of time working at my computer.
I am 24 years old, so I haven’t been doing this for THAT many years.
I like to write things in a physical notebook as part of my process as I work.
I also use a mouse to interact with my computer.
Problem: Mouse on right side means no space for notebook on right side.
Solution: Move mouse to left side.
Question: Why didn’t I think of this earlier? It seems to me, on introspection, that I never noticed that the problem could be solvable, and therefore never actually tried to solve it.
Potential take away: Try to be mindful when you notice something annoying so you can ask yourself, can I solve this? If you don’t even notice the opportunity to be rational it’s hard to make things better.
This is a very accurate description of my recent behavior, though I’m working on spaced repetition software. It’s something I’m trying to learn to not do.
Claude code can often create the feeling of progress on a project while producing very little useful output. It seems the models have, for some reason, become good at engendering a feeling of clarity, without actually producing very much insight into the problem.
On the other hand, LLM chat in the browser is pretty unbeatable for queries like “what is a CRDT and what human authored content should I read to really understand them” + a few follow up questions.
Additionally…
I’ve had success with various ‘reformatting’ tasks. I.e. turn this paper into a presentation, or these stream of consciousness notes into a more nicely formatted and well organized document. I’ve had mixed success with “review this” kinds of tasks. They often find issues, but also often produce a ton of false positives that waste a ton of time.
Like silentbob I also know engineers with ‘extremely advanced agentic coding workflows’ but I’ve never been able to replicate their success.