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Solar is so back
May 12, 2026 · original
Against my better judgment, I gave the solar sales guy at Home Depot my contact info. I’m glad I did, because it eventually led to me finding a deal from another company that will cut my electric bill in half. I can’t claim victory because I haven’t signed the deal, let alone seen the end result, but I want to share what I have learned because the window of opportunity may be closing. Here we go again Last time I looked into solar , high interest rates made financing too expensive, and most of the projected savings were lost. Then, Trump’s tax bill killed the incredibly helpful 25D credit , which was effectively 30% cash back on a solar panel system. Yet, it looks like the dream is still alive, and that is because of how much grid electricity prices have spiked and because—for now—there is still a way to get a 30% discount. If you contract with a solar business to install panels they own
My brain, on Ritalin
Apr 7, 2026 · original
It has now been about 3 months since I started ADHD medication . I feel conflicted about accepting the idea that “I need drugs to live my life”, to put it as bluntly as possible. It makes me feel defective, or like I gave up. But this feeling is tiny compared to my sense of gratitude. I truly don’t know how I made it this far without support. People with broken legs use crutches; people with bad eyesight use glasses; people with allergies take antihistamines. Somehow, it feels different when it’s supporting how my brain works. The big difference is that I am now able to act at-will. I don’t spend hours spinning my wheels before I can actually start a task. I simply decide and then start doing. I am also able to stay on-task for much longer. The end result is that the gap between “I want to do”, “I am doing”, and “I am done” is substantially smaller. It is embarrassing to admit that pre-m
Agentic coding growing pains
Feb 28, 2026 · original
I had a tough week, a week ago. My manager pointed out some of the negative side effects of my aggressive adoption of agentic coding, prompting me to rethink how I’m approaching my work. In particular, he pointed out that the fact that while I was able to take on some audacious tasks, the fact that I don’t yet have a deep understanding of the systems being manipulated puts a large burden on the reviewers to catch things that an expert in the codebase would have done. The result is frustration and damaged trust. He was very clear that I’m not the only person in the org experiencing this. It’s a pattern he and other managers are seeing with people who joined around the time I did. Whether it’s just a “me problem” or a bigger issue, it was a tough pill to swallow. I hate disappointing my manager and my teammates. Secondly, I felt I was doing a great job of two of the things that we are bein
The AI Landslide Is Happening
Feb 18, 2026 · original
When it comes to AI changing the tech world, we’re at a juncture where you’ve either: seen some shit with your own eyes or you believe your imagination of where this is going or, you haven’t and you’re dubious It feels like people are living in a fractured reality. For the moment, that is stable. But reality is not completely subjective. The way we each get to live in the world is shaped by things outside of our subjective perspective. That is going to hit all of us, regardless of what we believe. Reality is subjective-ish We all know the term “perception is reality”. It observes the fact that humans don’t need to actually agree on truth, in many situations. Sometimes, you’re better off meeting people where they are in their subjective reality than trying to change it. For instance, whether I believe the Earth is a sphere or flat disk has no direct bearing on my life 1 , unless I need to
CDAP: a revolutionary way of working with AI agents
Jan 25, 2026 · original
I have adopted a new way of taking on complex projects, and it is radically increasing my productivity. The idea is simple: I use documents as the shared canvas for collaboration between myself and chatbot sessions. The result is far more powerful than the sum of its parts. I call it chatbot+document-assisted projects , or CDAPs . Origin story Documents have been an essential part of how I conduct most parts of my life since my teenage years. They are how I work out ideas, record progress, reflect on outcomes, and communicate. My tools have progressed from notebooks to text files to Evernote to Notion, with me gaining significantly more leverage at each step. My history with chatbots is obviously much more recent. Chatbots started out as a toy to me. Initially they were too unreliable for serious work. In the ChatGPT 4 era, they became useful enough to answer questions and get me out of
Brave new world: rethinking software development
Jan 23, 2026 · original
We’re in the midst of a massive pivot in the entire line of work of software development. At least in some places, like where I work, everything is different. Breakneck change A year ago, I thought agents were vaporware and LLMs were not to be trusted with anything where truth is paramount. If you asked me 2 months ago, I would have told you that communication skills with the LLM were now paramount. Now, in some cases, that’s barely necessary. I’m sometimes able to one-shot changes just by pointing Claude code at a ticket with just a description and no content. People are unleashing fleets of agents on backlogs. Coding is no longer the bottleneck, and gradually, we’re working on eliminating subsequent bottlenecks, like testing and code review. I believe it’s completely possible. For a glimpse of what people on the bleeding edge are doing, read Welcome To Gas Town . This could soon be how
Took my first Ritalin, AMA
Jan 15, 2026 · original
My brain, not on drugs As a child of the 90s, it’s a bit surreal to be taking Ritalin for the first time. Growing up, ADHD was kids bouncing off the walls, causing disruptions in class and having trouble with school. Ritalin was what they got in their daily trips to the nurse. This didn’t describe me. However, as I came to understand the modern perspective of ADHD, I realized I pretty clearly have had it all along. I have always struggled with executive dysfunction but didn’t have the vocabulary for it when I was young. I just thought I had tendencies to be lazy, careless, and distracted. It didn’t occur to me that this could have a neurological basis. It seemed like more of a moral failing. At times, this made me feel pretty bad about myself. As I learned about ADHD, I increasingly identified with it. I noticed things about myself. How often I start and abandon tasks. How hard it is to
Truly persistent terminals in VSCode and Cursor
Dec 5, 2025 · original
There are times when I am embarrassed to realize that I have accepted a painful limitation for years. In this case, it is my resistance to restarting my IDEs because I don’t want to lose my terminals. Now, thanks to a burst of motivation and a modern chatbot, I’m setup for my IDEs to resume exactly where they left off. TL;DR: show me the code VSCode / Cursor Config { "terminal.integrated.profiles.osx": { "ide-persistent-shell": { "path": "/Users/yourusername/.local/bin/ide-persistent-shell" } }, "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.osx": "ide-persistent-shell", "terminal.integrated.env.osx": { "EDITOR_ID": "cursor" }, "terminal.integrated.enablePersistentSessions": true } Main script #!/bin/bash # ~/.local/bin/ide-persistent-shell # Get editor identifier from environment variable (defaults to 'vscode') EDITOR_ID="${EDITOR_ID:-vscode}" PROJECT_NAME=$(basename "$(pwd)") SESSION_PREFIX="${ED
You might actually need it
Nov 12, 2025 · original
There’s a saying that changed my life as a programmer: YAGNI: You ain’t gonna need it It’s the antidote to perfectionism. YAGNI comes from the observation that we are very bad at predicting the needs of the future. Adopting YAGNI changed how I code. I also try to apply that to decluttering my life. But every now and then, something you have held on to for years actually does come in handy. When I was a kid, I had a fascination with the idea of lockpicking. Probably not an uncommon fixation for people who obsessed with learning how things work. In college, I ordered a pick set and some locks. I learned the basics, but ultimately was much more interested in partying than picking locks. I don’t know if I ever picked a single lock before relegating my equipment to my knick knack bin. 20 years later, I was doing bedtime for our 4 kids, at the time, all aged 5-and-under. Every night somehow en
$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world
Oct 17, 2025 · original
For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value. I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful. For nearly 3 years, I worked for an upstart mortgage lender called Better.com . I was hired to manage software engineers working on the core piece of technology we used for automating the extremely complex process of mortgage lending. Better compensated us engineers well. The leadership of the company believed in paying aggressively to attract engineers who might otherwise work at the Googles and Ubers of

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