I’ve long worked in organizations with engineers spread around the globe. It’s common to wake up to PRs, incidents, emails, DMs, etc. from colleagues working where the sun rises long before it does where I live. There’s a certain amount of mental and comprehension overload that happens with that setup.

Do I need to jump in and work on any of these things? Which of them takes priority? Will I be helping or just adding noise to the work in progress? Now, we’ve added a new player into this and ,in some cases, it’s a challenge of my own making.

The"night shift" agent seems like a true boon on the surface. It can do what I ask it do while I sleep. I wake up and find entire new features built, tested, and documented. That’s an amazing productivity boost. It’s almost like having two days of work in a single day. This is amazing. Think of all the things we can get done that we never had time for before.

There’s a catch, though. There’s always a catch. The review and comprehension burden that agents have already created for us has now doubled. In this case, we don’t even have the benefit of having watched or interacted as the solution was put together. No chance to redirect the agent or stop it if we see it going astray. It’s just a massive blob of code that we need to understand, troubleshoot, test, and be able to justify to our colleagues and our customers.

We haven’t even considered the opportunity cost of that “fresh eyes” moment that many of us have in the mornings. We wake up with a new perspective on that little nagging concern about yesterday’s work. We open the editor and we see a new, better way to get it done. Where is the space for that when the PR from the agent waits for our approval? Why fiddle with yesterday’s thing that’s “probably good enough” when there’s a whole new thing that’s “already done”?

This feels like a ripe setup for burnout. It feels like a trap for unintended consequences. It feels untenable.

I don’t typically work like this but I know quite a few engineers who do. I don’t worry about the quality of their work because they are good engineers, great engineers even, and I know they’ll ensure the work is up to snuff. I do worry about their happiness, their fulfillment, their joy of having solved a hard problem with a craft they’ve honed over the years. This fear isn’t new because of “night shift” agentic work but that expectation does seem like one more facet being carved into what is quickly becoming a fractured line of work.

Another week. Another round of tornado watches.

I doubt this holds through the end of the competition but I’m proud of myself for being in the top 25 percent or so of all athletes in my age group.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was very overweight and facing an early death.

You know the world is changing when your wildly non-technical spouse sends you a link to a Claude thread where she’s been hashing out the requirements for an app she needs for her animal husbandry business.

Walmart’s Great Value ginger snaps are the best ginger snaps you can buy. You can make better but you can’t buy better.

Coldplay’s Parachutes album still holds up 25+ years later. Anyone of a certain age probably has a story about this album and/or one of its songs.

This folks define “lifetime” a bit differently than I do.

My son is taking the SAT today. He asked me this morning, “Did they have Latin on the SAT when you took it?” I guess he thinks I’m 150 years old.

It’s a bit wild to go back and look at some of the notes I made and conversations I had a year ago about using AI for code. The things I struggled with then aren’t even a consideration now. How long can this pace of change continue?

There have been 14,000+ visitors to Deathless and not one conversion (outside of my family members). That’s a little disheartening. I guess it’s time to learn how to make Shopify sites convert better.

Every day working with AI sees me vacillating from escalating excitement for what’s possible to deeper depths of dread of what’s possible. I’m not moderating. I’m swinging ever more wildly from zenith to nadir.

I never suspected I’d be sitting at work wishing I could get back to a 1000 page Russian novel but I guess that’s what The Brothers Karamazov does to you.

The MacBook Neo seems like a great idea. 8gb of RAM will be the big hinge point but I suspect for most users, it won’t matter. Everything they do is a website now.

What a beautiful machine. The fastest steam engine ever, the Mallard.

If you were going to buy clothing, specifically tshirts, from a brand you’d never interacted with before. What would sway you the most? Design? Materials? Story? Price?

I was just reminded of this RC Cola I had in Prague several years back. I’m pretty sure this is only made for the international market outside the US or what they call in Czechia, the “HoReCa” market.

My Lenten fast did not go well this evening. Homemade cake at the fish fry at church sent me spiraling as I also finished off some leftovers which happened to be beef.

It’s a good reminder that we need the Lord’s help all the time. Progress not perfection. Glory be…

I’ve been doing some work around IndieWeb and SmallWeb sites and communities. I thought I’d throw together a little app to help folks find their dead 88x31 button links.

If you, like me, spend your day netjacking the cyberlanes to fight against the corpobots, this is your soundtrack:

Five books were delivered to my house yesterday. I duly placed them on the stack of books that have accumulated next my bed. Now things are as they should be. What’s that you ask? Will I be reading them? Oh, at some point, in this life or the one to come, I’ll read them. God willing.

The world of social media advertising is a nightmare. The tooling that these companies (Meta, X, Google, TikTok) expect you to use is inscrutable, buggy, and full of dark patterns. No wonder the companies which make this their business can charge so much to help.

I probably won’t be adding this to the library anytime soon.

I don’t know if I mentioned it here but Deathless has finally launched. Buy a t-shirt, please!

This Lent, I’m trying to get back to blogging and the universe around Indieweb/Smallweb projects. Letting my creative juices flow a bit more. It’s been great to discover MelonLand and 32bit.cafe among others.

I hit a major goal this morning. I got my weight below 200 for the first time since I was 15 years old. Just in time for my 50th birthday.