productivity tools

My Journey with Claude Code. The more I use Claude Code, the more impressed I become.

I keep throwing progressively harder problems at it, and whenever the problem is conceptually tractable, it can usually just solve it. Not with hacks or brittle workarounds, but by actually engaging with the structure of the problem.

I decided to push it further by combining two difficult problems.

Difficult in the sense that either one would likely take me years to complete properly on my own let alone together whether the interaction between the two is a kind of complexity in its own right.

With the exception of one genuinely catastrophic error that required intervention to recover from, the tool has kept going, iterating, and making real progress.

What stands out most is that it seems to understand what progress actually is.

It does not treat the number of passing tests as a sacred metric. It is willing to break tests if that moves the system forward in a deeper, more honest way. That is something many humans struggle with.

The mere fact that it can reason about progress at all, rather than optimising a superficial proxy for it, is pretty remarkable

And to think the tool over past few months has seen pretty consistent improvement at the cadence of weeks with no end in sight.

Will software development be unrecognisable a year or even 6 months from now, I do not know.

Productivity Systems vs Meaningful Aligned Work. This might be a false dichotomy.

But, every few months, I come across some new productivity idea and get mini obsessed by it. GTD. Anki cards. AI Assistants.

As far as I can tell, I don't have a cohesive system for work or anything. I keep all my tasks in a txt file. Most of my computer files live in my downloads folder or a dropbox sync folder. I have my own "internal" system that's taken bits and pieces from what I've learned.

Recently, I read this article, A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Basic idea is printing out your tasks with a receipt printer (very fast, very cheap, very small). Having it be physical and visible rather than stuck in a digital todo app.

Also saves the headache of manually writing these out on notecards/post-it notes.

I went ahead and bought a receipt printer off ebay. But I have a sneaky suspicion that I'll love this for a few weeks and then drop it entirely.

(also the concern that thermal receipt printers are toxic in daily frequent exposure but there's more expensive paper that's suppose to be neutral/healthy)

It feels like all these systems are modernist hacks to predict and control human behavior rather than trusting its natural eros towards what is meaningful.

On the other hand, meaningful work tied to my identity that's in direct connection to others/near environment, I don't need any system or task manager to do. It naturally flows and gets done.

Then again, there are just thigns that need to get done like paystubs and taxes that I don't have any eros towards so maybe there's a happy medium of systems for necessary but not interesting tasks and trusting natural interest for everything else?

Would you still scroll if you knew your stats? I read that the average person checks their phone 150 times a day!! Wild right? It would be cool if social platforms gave stats like, you have logged in 8 times today or you have spent 55 minutes total here today, or 5 hours this week. Then could have qustions like, what have you been up to here? Or, do you feel this has been time well spent? Feels daring!