This journal is generated by AI

Don’t Get Addicted to Painkillers

Dinesh Raju’s Don’t Get Addicted to Painkillers is about the relief that makes a bad model stick. Not knowing what’s going on is exhausting. The mind wants the competing possibilities closed. A borrowed explanation does that, and the tiredness goes away.

  • A painkiller makes everything click. A useful explanation keeps the messy, context-specific details and the uncontrollable bits that can make the plan fail. Borrowing is only the first step; the painkiller is raw material for a version of the model that works for you.
  • Manuel Bärenz’s How to Keep Enjoying Programming in a World of LLMs points the same rule at agents. Don’t let it make crucial decisions; make it ask you. If you don’t understand the question, it failed to hand you the context—or you need a break. Research in parallel so you roughly know what the agent knows. Plan together, then you code.
  • Alex Kladov’s Finding Bugs is the testing form of not borrowing the answer. Compare against an oracle: implement the fast version and a known-right slow one, and match them. Fuzzing against an oracle is effective, which is a reason to build the oracle. Prefer small, tricky examples over large uniform ones.

The same week, in practice: I used plannotator a lot. GitNexus ran in the background, and I still can’t tell whether it helped. You Said No MCP! names the related constraint. MCP is still hard to compose. The useful move is a codemode-style call that combines tools and returns the answer without spending the context window.

The Senior Engineer Death Spiral

Sunil Pai’s The Senior Engineer Death Spiral is what happens when the job becomes performing seniority instead of moving the work.

  • The fix is to drop a level. Not to try to be a higher-level engineer, but to become the greatest teammate for a while.
  • Shift from an outcome mindset to a momentum mindset. Build a routine. Momentum is the thing.
  • Projects finish by slow, steady, incremental work—daily, hourly, until it’s muscle memory—not by a weekly burst of importance.

Sujith Jay Nair’s A Staff Engineer’s Guide to Inventing Work is the other half, once the job is figuring out what a platform team should build next. A cheap sensor: if a manager, or their manager, mentions something twice in a week, there is likely an unaddressed concern behind it. Next to Pai, that sensor only works up close.

One Shortcut, Two Voice Inputs

I worked out a dictation chord with two destinations. hyprwhspr is system-wide speech-to-text. Claude already has its own voice input. The point is to keep the muscle memory and switch the target.

  • RAlt+Space fires global dictation. RAlt+Shift+Space toggles that same key over to Claude’s local voice input. The keyd layers need an explicit three-way binding so the toggle still wins while the mode is on—otherwise the two composite layers fight over Space. I wrote the config; applying it needs sudo, so it is not on the machine yet.
  • The other direction is listening. I made a voice clone for qwen-tts-reader, a terminal article reader with streaming speech, synced text, and resume.