The Productivity Mirage

to be fair, the car mod people's end goal is just modding their cars mostly. there's no end goal like there is with software (a product).

I think people just get preoccupied with things that make them feel good and are simple and have immediate feedback. Not to be pedantic, but I would argue the more accurate analogy to this is the photography community. I had a period where I was really obsessed with photography and realized the majority of people love just...buying shit. All they did was just collect cameras and lenses and took extremely mediocre pictures. Turns out actual creativity is a lot harder and less immediately satisfying than the dopamine hit of buying some new lens, or changing your vim colorscheme and updating some alias for the 100th time. I'm sure there's some psychology behind people being too afraid to actually produce something because then they actually put themselves out there whether that's through some website or a photograph.

But this article mirrors my thinking on every new notes app, or new “second brain,” or somehow new or better version of Jira, etc. There are real productivity gains and losses and a lot of theatrics.

To be fair I mess with “how” I use or orchestrate the harness myself, I still can’t say anything I do that benefits me is more than placebo. At least from my projects. I think it matters easily for the things that can be patched like Context7 helping with API knowledge, and less for those that can’t like whatever “prompting style” attempts to address.

Maybe for those, you can say it matters in making agent use more subjectively ergonomic? So less of a correctness thing and more of reducing fatigue.