Max Countryman
Nice attends to how something feels in the moment. Kind considers what it means for someone over time.
Urgent tells us how soon something needs attention. Important tells us how much it matters.
Smart finds a way to accomplish something. Wise considers whether it’s worth doing and what might follow.
Nice, urgent, and smart are often immediately apparent. Kind, important, and wise can take longer to recognize. We risk mistaking what’s easiest to notice for what matters most.
I’m fascinated by how vacancy chains unfold in nature.
Wikipedia describes both synchronous and asynchronous vacancy chains in hermit crabs. During a group exchange, crabs form a queue from biggest to smallest around an empty shell. When a crab of the right size takes that shell, its former home becomes available to the next crab:
… the crabs then all rapidly exchange shells, in sequence, until they all have a larger shell, allowing them to grow without restriction.
I’m putting together a dev environment in a VM with ChatGPT and Codex. As part of that work, I’m using Codex to develop a small set of skills for use throughout the environment.
The goal is to make improving the environment part of working in it. Time spent refining how it approaches a task should carry forward into better results on future work.
Full development automation requires production context to become part of the agent’s working context. An agent needs to understand what happens after it deploys to decide what to change next. That changes what the development loop has to include.
I’ve started using VMs to contain Codex.
One useful side effect is that my development environment is moving wholesale into the VM. Tart has been particularly impressive.
I’m rebuilding my personal site as a small, text-first microblog.
It’s deliberately simple: a chronological feed, permanent links, and an archive I own.