My biggest fear was that I wouldn’t have anything to say, so around two months ago I began collecting ideas. Then, I set a goal to make one of them every day for thirty days. That was thirty days ago and this is thing number thirty.
Generally the made things have been text. There have also been a handful of visual posts and each of those has built on top of the infrastructure left behind by the previous. The text posts build on each other, too.
Ideas crystallize when you write them down. Before they harden, they are soft, malleable, fuzzy. But you can’t build a house out of soft, malleable, fuzzy. When you write them down they become tangible, concrete, fixed. You are forced to draw a line and stop equivocating. That doesn’t mean you have to over-commit to a viewpoint (although I often do) but you have to at least identify a viewpoint.
Looking back, every one of them was time well spent. There were a handful of 11pms that had me staring vacantly at an empty text editor and it shows in the quality of the posts, but there are also a few that I think came out well:
Coding Agents As An Interface To The Codebase is a key framing that is central to my approach to software engineering right now and most people miss.
Shooting Stars is borne out of the limitations of the ASCII animation framework, and it works really well. I sometimes look over at my wife’s desk and see it open on her secondary monitor.
I have always wanted to write fiction, but never had a story to tell. The Monoliths of Earthgarden is a first stab at just saying “something” to begin telling a story.
Overall, it’s definitely been ‘quantity over quality’. There’s a famous story about a pottery class, where half the class is tasked with making the best vase possible, and half the class with making as many vases as possible. By the end, the ‘quantity’ cohort had made much better vases than the ‘quality’ cohort because it turns out the practice of just making something is how you get better. I have absolutely no idea if that story is true, but the principle behind it was plausible enough to be worth a try.
That said, this is too much quantity for me. Making something every day has been incredibly motivating and I’m loving it—I highly recommend this to anyone and everyone—but most of my ideas are bigger than something I can make in one sitting. I want time to do prep work, but at one post a day the ever looming threat of the midnight deadline cows me.
I could just give it up here. This was only a 30 day experiment and I have achieved my goal.
Unfortunately, I’m having too much fun. Instead, I’ll try posting every other day and doing prep work on the non-posting days. Let’s see how that goes.
My wife, who uses LLMs pretty much all day, says that Claude Opus 4.6 feels more ‘mature’ than 4.5.
Anthropomorphizing models is dangerous, but it’s always a bit of a delight when I notice us talking about software using human personality traits. It clearly points at coherent concepts, pieces of software now have distinct ‘personalities’ that compare naturally to those of humans.
Anyway, I use LLMs a fair bit too, and tend to agree with my wife’s assessment. Anecdotally, it is more cautious, more likely to catch itself going on a tangent, and tends towards more of a neutral stance than 4.5.
Does this match your experience?