Espresso Shots 3-15-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Will Claude Code Ruin Our Team?. Despite what you think about where we are today concerning AI, we have to accept that the genie is already out of the bottle. Sure, the next few years will be filled with polarized views on the tech; some love it, some hate it, some see it as a tool, and there's a ton of misinformation and ill-informed folks who act on things they read, rather than spending real quality time with these tools. Where am I? I saw a quote in this post that captured where my head is as of late: 'The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage of my remaining 10% went up by a thousand.'. I have no idea where this stuff will end - it could be a great way to reclaim some time, or it will scorch the earth with the data center and energy usage. We're already seeing some of the tech giants act in good/evil ways. All I know is that it's important to be educated. I've been approaching Claude Code with childlike curiosity, and I'm building some tools I never had time for before; and that's awesome! But I also have 30 years of software engineering experience, crafting APIs, debugging wacky code, and understanding what goes on under the hood that could cause a system to collapse. 'Very little about software engineering has changed over the past three months. A great deal has changed about coding.' Important words to remember from Grady Booch.
• Grief and the AI Split. Speaking of polarized views, Les Orchard has a wonderful post on the grief among long-time software engineers. 'AI-assisted coding is revealing a split among developers that was always there but invisible when we all worked the same way. I've felt the grief too—but mine resolved differently than I expected, and I think that says something about what kind of developer I've been all along.' I won't spoil it, it's a good thought piece to savor. Side note: I've probably been following Les for 20 years, and even had a short opportunity to work with him back in my Yahoo! days. A fantastic technologist to read more from if you're not already.
• Phantom Fluency. I mentioned the new RSS reader, Current, a few weeks back. In this post explaining the background, Terry captured a feeling I've been trying to explain about what's wrong with user interfaces and comprehension. 'Scientists call what happens next the fluency illusion. When information feels easy to process, your brain interprets that ease as learning. But processing ease has almost no relationship to retention. Often it's the opposite: productive difficulty is what makes knowledge stick.... That's the experience I've started calling phantom fluency. The ghost of comprehension. You felt fluent in someone else's ideas. The fluency was real. The comprehension was not.'
• The Gut Decision Matrix: When to Trust Instinct and Intuition. As usual, when Anne-Laure Le Cunff posts, it resets my thinking. 'We often talk about "trusting our gut.” But the gut feelings people refer to can actually stem from two very different sources: instinct and intuition. Because they feel so similar (fast, automatic, sometimes emotional) we tend to treat them the same, which can lead to poor decision-making in many situations. Instinct is evolutionary and biological, designed for survival. Intuition is learned pattern recognition, built through experience. When we confuse them, we may trust reactions that deserve skepticism or ignore signals that deserve attention.'
• The Noble Path. 'I think what I'm arguing against is the monoculture. The idea that building-as-business is the only legitimate mode of making things, and that everything else is either a hobby (dismissive) or a pre-revenue startup (aspirational). I'm arguing for the recovery of a third category: building as gift, building as an expression of care for a specific community of people whose problems you understand because you're one of them.' Wow; I really liked where this one landed 'The Noble Path as I see it is to build a small, imperfect, deeply useful thing and give it away to the people who need it. Skip the landing page and the waitlist. A thing that works, offered freely, in the oldest and most human tradition of making things for each other.'
• The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming Is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete. Described as 'the system that nobody likes but everyone depends on' seems to be a common theme with more 'platforms' these days. There's something really profound in here, 'When music is treated like a utility, it's unconsciously devalued by the consumer. It's background noise.' Speaking of which, isn't that what Sam Altman just said about intelligence? (He said, 'We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.' Not a great take, IMHO. But what do I know.)
• The Block Universe: A Theory Where Every Moment Already Exists. Ever since I read Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five, I've been fascinated by the idea that time could be non-linear: what has happened and what is going to happen exist at one moment. Quick spoiler if you haven't read it: 'Throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim frequently travels back and forth through time. The protagonist deals with a temporal crisis as a result of his post-war psychological trauma.'. So, it goes without saying that when I came across this post about block universes, I was pulled in. 'In this interview, theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili breaks the problem of time into four key questions: Does time actually flow? How can quantum field theory be reconciled with general relativity? What defines the present moment? And why does time seem to move in only one direction?' If you want to watch the full video, it's great. So it goes.
• Africa (Toto) but It Lists Every Country in Africa. Ok, this is quirky and fun. Also, There I Ruined It, is turning into a fun place to find stuff, well, they ruin. Their rendition of Back in Black is hilarious. :)
• BRICKA - Premium Magazine for Adult Fans of LEGO. Found this new magazine over the week, and I instantly subscribed to the print edition. 'BRICKA was created as a space where creativity, play, and design meet — where a single brick becomes story and art. Issue 1 celebrates the makers redefining what LEGO can be.'
• One Brick Less. From the BRICKA magazine, 'a professor's young son fixes a LEGO Duplo bridge by removing a single block, that quiet act of subtraction would go on to inspire a decade of research into a powerful bias in human thinking: our tendency to add rather than remove when solving problems.' Subtraction is always an amazing way to clear the path.
• The $200 Plastic Box Opportunity. 'This is why personal brands are not only a real thing, they are the realest thing right now. People pay for a narrative. People pay based on trust and relationships.' Also a counterpoint to remember, social 'influencers' often are a different category that you need to be acutely aware of.
• How to Change Your Entire Life in One Day. Mark Manson hit it out of the park with this one. I love the ideas of 'quantum change' and how it manifests change, and an anti-vision. A quick (20 min) watch that is well worth the time.
• Why I Email Complete Strangers. I don't know why people don't do this more often, but I've often emailed authors of books out of the blue, and most times, they do respond! 'There’s something vulnerable about sending missives out into the void, not knowing if you’ll be welcomed or ignored. We’ve been conditioned to think of unsolicited contact as unwelcome. While much of it is ... there’s a difference between spam and genuine effort. There’s something to be said for respecting the other person’s time and attention.'
• Crucial Tracks Music Journal - the Songs That Made You. Recently discovered this website, Crucial Tracks. 'What are crucial tracks? A crucial track is a song that changes the direction of your life or helps you see the world in a different way. The songs that represent relationships or trigger memories. The songs that make you, you. Crucial Tracks is a music journal with a simple idea: share the important songs in your life.' Brilliant!
• George Lucas on the Meaning of Life. Closing out the week with this post that was originally in the 1991 book, The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here. 'It is possible that on a spiritual level we are all connected in a way that continues beyond the comings and goings of various life forms. My best guess is that we share a collective spirit or life force or consciousness that encompasses and goes beyond individual life forms. There’s a part of us that connects to other humans, connects to other animals, connects to plants, connects to the planet, connects to the universe. I don’t think we can understand it through any kind of verbal, written or intellectual means. But I do believe that we all know this, even if it is on a level beyond our normal conscious thoughts.' The force will be with you, always.

Amor Fati ✌🏻