Weeknotes: 2025-W29

Published: 21 July, 2025, updated: 21 July, 2025

Summary

A week of generating, but not writing, a lot of code. I decided to run two projects using an agent-makes-changes-only approach, with agents writing specs for other agents to do research or implement code based on prompts and existing project documentation.

One of these projects is a system for multi-agent orchestration, with a project manager role delegating work to other roles to do things like research, spec-writing, and implementation - now with fully automated hand-over, and the manual steps being around giving review sign-off, feedback, and permission.

Met up in person with my first former colleague since I resigned. Besides being good to see and talk to them, it was great to notice how firmly I’m out of the thought cycles and emotional reactions that were part of my burnout, and also noticing how excited I was about the stuff I was working on.

Spent a lot of time on “work”, which was good to ward off my worries about my productivity progress and bad because it meant I didn’t really treat my weekend differently.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

One of my agent-only projects

Just a rose

Enjoying

Reading:
- This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl #7) by Matt Dinniman (★★★★☆)
  - Seems a lot more sprawly and discombobulated than previous entries - one of those “could have used a good editor” phases. Still, fun - often hilarious.
Watching (📺🏃🐌📅🎥📽️🏠🔄🏁💑👥★☆):
- 📺🐌🏁 Dark Matter season 1 (★★★★☆)
  - For some reason I’m a bit unsatisfied overall by this, although I can’t point to anything in particular - everything seemed well-executed.
- 📺🐌💑 Hacks season 4
- 📺📅 The Institute season 1
- 📺🏃🔄 Lost Girl seasons 4 and 5
Playing:
- Beat Saber

Newly discovered

Khronos Texture Software

I somehow managed to not stumble into this last time I was looking for KTX generators, and I was rather surprised at how it comes as a standalone binary that’s easily installed into a minimal container.

Highlights

We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be, tormented by the gap between our aspirations and our abilities.
This torment has a name in cognitive science: the “taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called “the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. … Faced with this unbearable gap, we develop what researchers call “productive avoidance” — staying busy with planning, researching, and dreaming while avoiding the vulnerable act of creating something concrete that might fail. It feels like work because it engages all our intellectual faculties. But it functions as avoidance because it protects us from the terrifying possibility of creating something imperfect.

– “being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage” by Maalvika Bhat

Combatting this productive avoidance is something I’ve been focusing on the last few months, and something I’ve been aware of being an issue for me not starting or completing the “real” part of projects for quite some time.

At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there.
All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.

– “Documenting what you’re willing to support (and not)”, rachelbythebay

This was a trick I used numerous times during my time at ~~Facebook~~ Meta. Usually I’d first make a proposal or write a post announcing that I’ll be putting up this document, then I’ll put up the document, and then I’d wait for a bit before citing it.

I found a surprising number of people in other parts of the company would be making similar documents and link back to all the similar documents, forming a web of authority around things like on-call guidance and guidelines, handling special events and code freezes, and so forth. And some of the teams in my org would build their own team-specific docs citing the org-level one.

“How does one keep up with all this?” seems to be a question a lot of people have about everything happening in the AI world right now, and one way I keep up is read Simon’s blog, where I’ll likely encounter anything major in the space. Here he is summarizing what’s happened so far this year.

Open Sauce 2025 vlog- Jeff Geerling

I attempted and failed quite spectacularly to convince myself to fly out to Open Sauce, so at least I get to have a peek into what was going on there.