It’s often I say ‘oh, just another day has passed! I did nothing today! Well… except… I wrote a few Rust programs to do some simple automations, a few Go programs to support them, but that’s nothing really special—’
And it is nothing really special, because I vibe-coded them.
Meaning, I wrote them with the AI-assisted coding,
toolsservices like Claude or ChatGPT or Qwen.Mostly Claude. (And Gemini was useless for me so far.)
Often, I feel exhaustion because of this. I am exhausted for a set of very different reasons, mostly kids and managing life in a warring country. (But kids more.)
Today is the day of a similar kind. It feels like I did nothing, when actually, I did quite many things today. I did like 10 little automations today, some of which are ad-hoc, meaning one-off things: I’d use them and discard. But I automated things that would take me either half a year to edit by hand, or a month or two to write something to automate that editing. Now, takes a prompt or two. And a few more if I’d like it to be an ongoing automation I’d use more than once.
It’s so exhausting! I casually do very complex things. I just don’t understand it, if everyone is like that, we can do very complex things like daily! Most of my software projects are stale, as I test them. Now, I initiate a small batch of tiny changes (most of which I can manage on my own, but since Claude et al. at my disposal, I kindly ask them to help, which boosts the speed, obviously).
I realised that’s akin to eating sugar. You get a huge boost of calories immediately, and your body does not need them that many.
Well, it’s not exactly like that with my personal / professional automations. I need them and they lower the cognitive load, as I can stop using proprietary services on a whim. Yesterday, just casually, when I was too tired to do anything else, I developed a full replacement for Clippings.io, a nice service I’ve been using for 15 years or so. It’s not 1-to-1 clone, and never intended to be it, it just processes my Kindle Clippings file as I like. There are many various tiny little things I can do with it, like dissecting some files or even languages (feels like complete magic). But the primary point is, it’s on my terms, open-source, and evergreen. I don’t ever need Clippings.io again, and all that is conveniently automated.
All I have to do is:
- Connect my Kindle to a computer (any Linux computer, which is all my computers)
- Mount it with Gnome File Manager (one click to open it, one click to mount)
- Run the Rust program that does the rest.
- Review my quotes before publishing them.
- Another program auto-deploys them all to my website.
I think of automating 2 and 3, whether I can just insert my Kindle, and the computer would do the rest. I’m not sure I need it, but I know it’s so trivial to do that it’s hard to not do that. I think of possibly pulling some LLM solution to formulate a title for them quotes, but so far I think it’s a pleasure to actually re-read them (at last!), and so… we’ll see. And the step 5 is the actual automation, there’s nothing to automate. It’ll take the quotes I edited recently, but won’t take the files that are very fresh, so it’ll allow me to review them for a day or two (I need to settle for the convenient time frame).
Each software solutions needs me to take a decision, it’s not something to automate and delegate to a machine (unless I don’t care, obviously). And that takes so much energy! I’m a CTO for this thing, and I keep about… let me count… about 30 Go programs, just 15 Rust programs, two JS Firefox browser extensions (them are very complex and very advanced!), and God knows how many Bash scripts I did not rewrite.
It’s so much that I’m struggling at even thinking about all that. They all have Readmes, --helps, and extensive specifications.
Well, most of them. Some tiny ones are missing, teh code is the help, readme, and the specification.
Not that it’s a bad thing. It is what it is. But it’s so tiresome! Today, I can get thousands of calories easily. My body needs… what? Two thousands? I can get ten, just hold my beer Coca-Cola! Before I’d drink it too, obviously.
Same with the code. I can do so much actually working, and even well-written (for the mundane tiny little immediate task) code… today I fucking sorted 40 files manually, just because I thought: ‘Oh, fuck it! I’m not going to automate that right now, because it would just take me 100x more energy than take 4 minutes to process them files with my bare hands, keyboard, and sometimes mouse too.’
It is what it is. We don’t need things to be too much, but we’re way past the point of no return. What would we collectively do about it? I don’t mean Luddites right now, but I’m quite concerned where that’s going. We’d travel through time, space, multiverses within a few years, right? Otherwise, is all this even a net-positive?
Perhaps that’s a problem of my own making. Some personal flaw. It’s done so much already, and I’m ‘nah, I have extra 15 minutes, I can do so much!’ And I do, and it’s done. And the weird thing is, I feel like I’m very slow. I can be quicker. I could be quicker. And maybe I would.
But that makes not so much sense, actually. Packing everything— too much of everything into a single small unit of time, is like packing a huge number of calories into small unit of food. You have to process it somehow, at some point. Otherwise, why would you even do that in the first place?
I have many thoughts on all that, but I’d save them for some other time. Because I did too much today already, and no real headspace left.