Slow down

With AI these days, slowing down—not going faster—is the main work

With sufficiently advanced technology, you flip from trying to go fast, to trying to slow down.

Let me explain.

Coding before AI. I’m always trying to go faster, better, more efficient, more accurate. But the tools slows me down. It takes times to triangulate multiple Stack Overflow post to find your answer. It take effort to type out your problem properly, to ask a friend, and for said friend to reply. Sometimes, he even needs to download your code to try it out a bit. Anything that helps me go faster—frameworks, libraries, saved snippets—is the game.

Coding after AI. I’m trying to intentionally slow down, to avoid accepting hallucinations, to avoid making mistakes. The coding is super fast now. Whole apps and codebases in minutes. So much code, so little understanding. It’s overwhelming. So I break it down. Do it page by page maybe. Scope it down to something I can still read and reason. YOLO too much, I might regret it later downstream.

Same thing with cars, smartphones, media consumption, diet.

From too little to too much.
From too slow to too fast.
From too quiet to too noisy.

These days, slowing down is the main work.

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