This was a terrifying read because I initially read about this at the air port in Madrid after taking a Renfe train from Alicante; literally at the same time...just a different line
tmux is probably my favourite tool by far. I highly suggest going through its documentation (even easier with LLMs now) to learn the basics. It's extremely scriptable.
One of favourite uses of it is its 'popup' feature. Combining the tmux popup with fzf creates a crazy opportunity of whats possible.
Highly suggest learning these tools; literally just point an agent at my comment here and ask it what one could do with tmux popup and fzf combined
You described my observation of many products today extremely well!
One interesting care study is Posthog (I felt like it was a labyrinth; using your analogy) - primarily build in an age of LLMs, with a large investment and a large team behind it - it reached this stage:
> one player in a space gets huge, keeps adding features, loses sight of what makes them a good market fit
My first experience using their product (they had a generous free year for new startups) felt like exactly what the author describes. A collection of features.
I think it's just really hard to "not build a feature" and keep a product focused. Whether you're solo or a large team
This is such a good article and absolutely nails what I've been feeling recently.
> The product changes are primarily additive, not improving the core problem.
> I think the reasons for this is that it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities.
> So each product becomes a collection of abilities, without actually having unified point of view.
> I wonder whether some of this comes from how the work is organized. Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory.
I recently left my job and have been working on building a product. And even though I'm solo, I notice it's still very easy to fall into this way of operating. (Even before AI)
Having a clear product vision and sticking in to it; whether its features, design, copywriting, etc is really hard to do consistently over the lifetime of building the product.
I've had to revisit my product direction and realized a year and half in that I've been approaching the problem with a heavy bias of what I think people want vs what I should have been doing and building what people want.
> Seriously, if a single politician stepped forward and said "i'll bring down ram prices" they could then shoot a puppy and call me a slur and I'd still go out and doorknock for them.
Not sure why this was downvoted. Memory is one of the most important skills imo
Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
> Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive
(trigger warning: I'm going to use the word "privilege" and hate myself for it...)
The comment above is your math-brain privilege speaking. Not every kid has the required mathematical aptitude for that. You can reach a level of basic competency with repeated drilling and practice, but not everybody's brain is wired to be able to retain the conceptual foundations and then just derive the rest.
This is where math education has gone off the rails, at least in California. It's great to introduce and emphasize the "why", but the curriculum has completely abandoned repetitive drilling. Kids aren't building up any muscle memory.
Anyone can learn to type +100wpm - just have to focus on your weak points and spend 5-10 minutes a day for a few months.
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