Letting go means stopping to care. That's a slippery slope to coasting.
The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#32It's good to remember it's a marathon, not a sprint and that everything rots over time.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#33Letting go means stopping to care. That's a slippery slope to coasting.
I think the Buddhists would disagree with you on the moral valence of this.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#34These days, knowing that instead of spending hours artfully crafting a solution to something, GPT could code up a far-less-elegant-but-still-working solution in about 5-10 minutes of prompting has all but solved this.
I went down this road and it doesn't free up time, you just get to fix many many more problems.
I should clarify - I don’t mean I use GPT to write these solutions, I leave them unsolved knowing that they’re solvable in a very inelegant way.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#35I too suffer from this, but as I learned, Nature built an elegant solution to this. Have a family and kids. Your choice when you have time off of work will be reduced to hacking or playing with your child that you have been neglecting due to a crunch at work. You’re welcome.
Or just have another hobby not involving programming. I got into this from being my main hobby as a kid, the passion thing I did when free time was available, I learnt a lot (enough to build it into a career), I had lots of fun but that time is gone.
My free time is to be spent on other things, I get paid to fix issues and that pays my bills, I don't want nor need to be thinking about these issues outside of paid hours, you know too much to the point where you know how much effort it will take to fix something that might look innocuous, innocent, but definitely has deep tendrils of other related issues to tackle. It's not worth it, not if I'm not being paid for it or it isn't part of a personal project I'm really passionate about.
So I learnt to not care much, I help my colleagues, deliver what I tell I will deliver, and free space in my mind to pursue other more interesting stuff to me.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#36I too suffer from this, but as I learned, Nature built an elegant solution to this. Have a family and kids. Your choice when you have time off of work will be reduced to hacking or playing with your child that you have been neglecting due to a crunch at work. You’re welcome.
Parent here, can confirm Nature solved this elegantly.
However, like every other solution built by Nature, this one also works through pain, suffering and death. Nature doesn't care if you're happy, nor does it care if you're suffering. And it especially doesn't care if your suffering is a low-burn, long-term pain in the depth of your heart.
So yeah, having kids will force you to make choices and abandon frivolities, in the same way setting your house on fire will free you from obsessing over choices for unnecessary expenses :).
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#37I see a similar issue in 2025, but with vibe coding.
It all boils down to the 3 key factors: speed, quality and cost. And you can't have it all
Know your trade-offs.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#38I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up. Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the bac…
I don't know if this is post-hoc justification, but I see myself as somebody who wants to know what everything is and how everything works - so to me, re-implementing (and always failing to take it to completion) is the means to an end. I think I spent the first 25 years of my life studying, so learning has become the goal itself. Work is there to provide funds to support me while I learn. Re-implementing the basics of something is a terrific tool for learning how it works.
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#39Glad I'm low enough on the bell curve to not have this problem. If a tool is broken I shrug. Maybe someone will fix it
Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
#40I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind. Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in anothe…
Does this help explain why any simple household activity has a frustrating ~50% chance of turning into a string of dependencies and dependents that make you spend 10x the time you expected on it all?
E.g. you figure it'll take a minute to take the trash out and wash your hands. But on the way you discover you run out of trash bags, and while washing your hands you run out of soap, then as you pick the refill bottle from storage some light items fall out, and you need to put them back into a stable configuration, then you spilled a bit of soap during refilling so you need to clean up, but you just run out of paper towels, and...