Weekly Reflection #9 - Deliberate Effort and FOMO
Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe)
Insight
We, as builders and software engineers, are here to think deeply about new problems that have never been solved before. That's the work. And yet there's world-class FOMO peddling in AI discourse right now. I recently saw a tweet posted to the Book Overflow Discord to the effect of, "If my engineers aren't running ten concurrent agents, I'll fire them," and suddenly many are questioning their personal workflow.
I get the temptation. LLMs feel like magic. But they are also master bullshitters who dangerously amplify complicated solutions if you're not careful. They're not the right tools for the deep, contemplative, and creative work required to push things forward on their own. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying, mistaken, or selling you something.
My antidote to the FOMO machine is a phrase commonly attributed to the US Navy SEALs, "slow is smooth, smooth is fast." Frantic effort feels productive, but it's mostly thrashing. Deliberate effort feels slower at first, but it builds a foundation that outpaces the taillight chasers with compounding returns over time.
Wisdom
"... the greatest limitation in writing software is our ability to understand the systems we are creating."
— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design
Reflection
What type of problems do you neglect when you're spread too thin?
Lagniappe
- I'm starting something new: Debug Mode - free live office hours where founders and engineering leaders can bring platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or other problems and get real-time help. First session is Thursday, February 19th at 11 AM Central. Sign up here if you want to join or (just get the recording later on Youtube).
- On Book Overflow we've started reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. So far we've discussed Chapters 1-4 on Reliability, Scalability, and Maintainability and Chapters 5-7 on Replication, Partitioning, & Transactions
- As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Reply and let me know what resonates.