Introduction

I am creating this blog as a repository for my thoughts and retrospectives so that they can later be processed into slop. It is my hope that by writing these ideas out, I will internalize some of these lessons, or at least provide some utility to someone else out there on the free-range internet. At the very least, I can look back on it ten years from now, see how off-base my predictions about the future were, and laugh at my own naivety.

Like many sweaty Linux try-hards, I have always been keen on the idea of a productivity hack: Pomodoro timers, Emacs Org mode, deeply nested tmux sessions, new window managers using the fanciest, leanest GPU acceleration to make Alt-Tabbing 13% faster, and some hot new Vim plugin manager that allows you to write your .vimrc differently than the last 20 .vimrc files. I'm now trying to refocus my "productivity hacking" on something that is actually relevant in the age of agentic coding tools.

The thing is: I actually like writing code, but no hyper-optimized terminal emulator paired with the lowest-resistance mechanical keyboard will make me faster than a coding agent. It's clear where the efficiency gains are, but now I feel like I am just along for the ride, returning to my desk several minutes later to review a dozen file changes and make sense of what happened.

So now I am in search of an ideal workflow that still gives me granular control over how things are built, where they live, and what they look like, while delegating the actual implementation to other tools.

In this series of posts, I plan to log my findings, and hopefully someone else may find them useful.