Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.

LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction).

This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in.

All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker.

There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something.

Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).

This feeling is something that immediately sets off an alarm in my head.

IRL every time I tried to impress someone, I said or did stupid things. These experiences are now part of cringe memories about myself.

In software, the paradox is often that making something simple is difficult, but easily reproducible and unimpressive for most people. It is kind of like the engineers' version of when people say that their 4yo kid could do the same drawings as Picasso.

Just go through the last 90% and finish the thing. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, perfection is reached not when there's nothing else to add, but when there's nothing more to remove.

Then put the V1.0 tag on it and move it to maintenance mode. Then move to the next project, which very well might be about covering a different set of needs in the same area.

Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.

What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.

It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.

When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.

At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.

In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.