dominicholmes

Joined 7 years ago

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Mar 25

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I really liked this. I've felt the exact thing the author is describing - I used to care a lot about my craft (iOS apps), and that has been blown apart by AI. Not that craft and taste isn't still a differentiator - I think it's just so much less satisfying to create something perfect over weeks, if you can get 80% of the way in an afternoon.

"Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community..."

I think a lot of the greatest art has been produced by this kind of "scene". Music for example isn't created only by an individual, it comes from listening and watching and playing with others. Later, you sit down and all of that input turns into something brand new.

I think at the same time I started getting "out of coding", I started getting deeper into music. And if it was just me, that would've been a short lived thing. But having people in real life to play with and bounce off makes it about 100x better and keeps you going long after you would've fallen off on your own.

I'd encourage anyone who feels this way to find something similar. The act of creation is still as essential as before, you just need to direct your energy toward something more purely human. Get into writing, drawing, woodworking... even as these things are instantly mass-producible, we'll still value and pay for humans to do them.

I think this has really softened the blow for me!

Comment · 7 months ago

Wow, really negative comments here! I'm not a cursor user, and I can't say I love the look of this UI, but my team and I are very heavy users of https://www.conductor.build . Managing many agents, each in their own sandbox, felt like indisputably the future after using conductor for a day. We were a cursor company before conductor, but we cancelled all our seats around the time Opus 4.6 dropped because conductor was vastly more productive. So IMO, Cursor is definitely moving in the right direction w/ this -- the days of the IDE are numbered & they're correctly designing for the future.

For me, there's no way to get into a flow state if I'm thinking about terminal windows and Claude Code. Even before conductor dropped on our team, I'd been building CLIs to spin up agent sandboxes on work trees -- but that still required a lot of terminal window management.

My work now is usually: - 1 hard task (hard to think about more than 1 of these at once) -- localized to a sandbox, but with multiple agents in different convo threads - N simpler tasks (usually 4-8). These are usually one-shottable. They're a pleasure to come up with & ship.

I'm thinking about and managing the hard task. When it's cooking for more than 10 seconds, I'm switching to an ez task and pushing them along.

Just like OG coding -- hard to be in a flow state every day. But when it works, you can get an unbelievable amount of work done.

I'll be walking around now, and I'll add voice notes of little tasks or cleanups I want to throw an agent at when I get home. Good products are made of 1000s of small, good decisions -- and now those are free to implement, the slowest part is writing them down as tickets.

Comment · 3 years ago

This was a really interesting read, thanks! Is it correct that this doesn't take into account any relative motion of the stars, and instead assumes they are fixed points? I assume the relative velocities are not significant since they're pretty close together, but I'm curious if you investigated that.