A Short Break From Making

I’ve spent the entirety of my career making things - software, games, companies. I’ve never felt much of a desire to publicly post my thinking. I found that doing so became a distraction from building things. And, there’s no better time to be a maker than right now. I pulled together laprally.com to learn Ai-assisted programming and re-built my passion-project / indie-game from scratch in a month. Fixing bugs in Subterfuge got easier too. Suddenly every side-project, every hobby-addon, every game idea, every new business is more within reach. It’s thrilling.

My approach to software development has generally been to ruthlessly stack-rank features, weighting them by effort. An amazing producer I worked with at Demiurge said - we should sort things by “awesomeness per peson-day”. Suddenly the denominator in that calculation is unrecognizable and all my instincts are broken.

It’s a sugar-rush of productivity. The same feeling I got when swapping a green weapon for a purple one in WoW. When suddenly you can build 10x faster there’s tremendous pressure to spend every minute cranking stuff out - nevermind not wanting to “waste” precious tokens at the end of a week! When you’re a workaholic whose job is also your hobby this gets dangerous real quick. My wife can attest to the absurdity of my constant babysitting the robots who are cranking away on some random thing that popped into my head earlier in the day.

So, I’m gonna spend a few weeks, or maybe even a couple of months noodling and not allow myself to start anything new and let what I referred to as a “distraction” in paragraph 1 become a focus.

Just one more quick project with Claude - this site right here. Then, I’m going to stop and just think, I promise.