I waste a lot of time. I don’t want to say it’s completely wasted, as I’m usually learning, but I often get sidetracked and get hyperfocused on some mundane aspect of what I’m trying to do — usually until the point that I get completely frustrated. But I digress, as I usually do.
I’m obsessed with reworking systems to the point where there’s basically no output. This blog, for example. I had the idea — hey, I’m not using this URL, let’s try out making a blog. So I spent a few hours designing and building a blog site. I wrote one article (that I hate and deleted). I spent additional time creating featured images that I thought were funny that I never used. I abandoned the blog. I hadn’t touched it in about a month.
Until a few weeks ago I prided myself on working with the base level of Claude — Sonnet 4.6, low thinking. If your work is AI assisted in any capacity you’re probably laughing at me, or mocking me, or some combination of both (which is fair). It actually worked quite well for a time — I was getting help, starting projects, creating what I thought was generally decent work. Until Claude completely shat on me. The work suffered, and I found out that Sonnet 4.6 had reasoning turned off. Granted, I didn’t research this at all, but either it never had reasoning to begin with, or it just went away at some point.
I had all these systems that I set up. All this work I did. Then my work started suffering and I had to rethink absolutely everything.
I’ve been working on rebuilding all my systems and tweaking them, updating processes and figuring out how to work with higher thinking models. But through all this work, my personal output has been extremely low. I stopped myself to think about it. I just LOVE tweaking systems. I love breaking things and putting them back together, physically or theoretically. Now I’m stressed out to a point where I need to consciously make sure that my output exceeds the systems that I’ve created — that these systems are actually getting used at all.
Lately I’m trying to be honest with myself, and this has all come together in a big existential supplement that I’m shoveling down my throat. Are processes broken, or am I just wasting time. Am I justified in yelling at a computer, or am I just an asshole?
These are all real questions that I’m trying to figure out and answer. Also I’m turning 41 in 21 days, so the existential pondering is higher than normal.
I need to tell myself what I keep telling Claude — react first, then build.