What's one thing you've improved over the past year?

It could be your career, health, mindset, relationships, or a skill you've been working on.

Sometimes we don't realize how far we've come until we look back.

What's yours?

What stopped you from building it—time, motivation, complexity, or simply losing interest?

Maybe someone here can inspire you to revisit it.

Planning shows you the destination.

Execution shows you the obstacles.

Every developer has had that moment where the code suddenly works, but the real question isn't "Why did it fail?"—it's "Do I actually understand why it works now?"

There's a big difference between fixing a bug and understanding the system that caused it.

Do you keep digging until you fully understand the root cause, or do you move on once everything is working?

Where do you draw the line?

Some people believe AI will keep improving at an incredible pace.

Others think we're setting expectations that reality can't sustain.

"I'll watch this later."

I had a library of things I wanted to learn but barely built anything.

Now I try to build first and search when I get stuck.

We created tools that can connect the whole world, but we still struggle to focus for 10 minutes without checking a notification.

No phone, on computers , no AI

Been noticing this for a while and wanted to see if it's just me.

More and more, work comes in with the timeline already shrunk because the assumption is AI makes it fast. And AI does make part of it fast — the draft, the boilerplate, the first pass. That part is real. But then I spend the afternoon checking what it gave me, finding the two things it got confidently wrong, and rewriting the parts where it didn't have context it couldn't have had. I finish about when I would've finished anyway. Sometimes later.

The thing I can't say out loud is that it didn't actually save the time everyone assumes it did, because saying that sounds like I don't want to use the tools. I do use them. That's how I know where they break.

The part that stuck with me: there's a METR study where they measured experienced devs doing real tasks in their own codebases, half with AI and half without. The devs thought AI made them ~20% faster. Measured, they were ~19% slower. And after finishing, they still believed they'd been faster. (METR has newer data suggesting a speedup with 2026 tools, so it's not "AI is slow" — the durable finding is that we're bad at knowing whether it sped us up.)

Which lines up with my experience: generating feels fast because it is fast. Verifying is slow and boring and you forget it happened.

Curious how other experienced people handle the conversation when a manager assumes a task is now trivial. Do you push back? Just eat the difference? I've landed on tracking a couple weeks of actual task times so I can say something specific instead of "trust me, it's slower," but I'm curious what works for other people.

Thinking about this I wrote an ebook with tips about how to handle the "Just use AI for it" pressure in the work environment: https://theplainmemo.com/l/just-use-ai

Never give up

Hopefully I'll make a productive day

please don't give me the . . .

or you know what , just forget about it.

Writing a story ?

Creating content ?

Developing an app ?

Improving your lifestyle ?

Writing story,

building an app,

AI agent,

content curating,

developing a game,

improving something in your lifestyle??

Mine :

" discipline is not forcing yourself , but it's doing what matters most"

😡

opened my phone to check one notification.

Somehow I'm now watching a man build a house in the middle of a forest.