Essays
Long-form thinking on attention, craft, and how the mind works.
Boredom is a feature
The answer to the problem I'm stuck on almost never shows up while I'm stuck on it. It shows up in the empty time I now spend all day deleting.
The mercy of the default
We treat the on-by-default toggle as something done to us. Most of the time I am glad it was done, and that is the part that should worry us.
The gap is the point
When I turned the AI assistant off for three days, I found a formula in my own code that I could not explain. Vygotsky had a name for what had been happening.
Is your IDE part of your mind?
Clark and Chalmers argued in 1998 that a notebook counts as part of Otto's cognition. Your code editor passes the same test. The interesting question is what we're measuring once it starts writing back.
The bug that didn't fire
Two engineers ship the same mistake. One's system is live, so the gap in their understanding becomes visible. The other's isn't. Thomas Nagel called this circumstantial luck, and software engineering is full of it.
Attention as a craft, not a resource
We talk about attention like it's a budget to spend. What if it's a skill, practiced, sharpened, and slowly lost when we stop using it?
Writing in the open is a different skill
Publishing rough thoughts in public taught me something I didn't expect: that polish and clarity are different muscles.