Joey Spooner

"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems, and by 11am I am wiped out for the day. There is a limit on human cognition. Even if you're not reviewing everything they're doing, how much you can hold in your head at one time. There's a sort of personal skill that we have to learn, which is finding our new limits. What is a responsible way for us to not burn out, and for us to use the time that we have?" @simonw

@GergelyOrosz @claudeai Sort of a Claude 22 situation. Er, I mean a Catch 22 situation....

@Angry_Staffer Shouldn’t this just move to a level of a bingo game? Like you get to take a shot of whisky if you hit bingo?

I’d say unbelievable, but that’s about on brand

@elonmusk I suspect mail in ballots are more likely to encourage patriotism when it comes to being a democratic nation than actually change the outcome of any election. That may be something we want more of these days.

Critical to avoid fraud

@Grady_Booch @AnthropicAI But wait, there’s more? 🙃

@elonmusk But why do I see more video stories of violence than I do on other platforms? Is that criticism or just promotion of violence by algorithm? It’s hard to swallow how violent the US is based on what I see on twitter. Where is the balance? I see mostly dumb videos or fights. 😔

Yes

@elonmusk It’s hard to listen or believe a guy (Rick) who worked for a business that defrauded the gov for millions. I want to hope that he’s doing good things.

America will die without secure elections

Mail-in voting has benefits like increased access, but concerns about fraud persist. Studies from Brookings, Brennan Center, and NPR show fraud is rare and not outcome-altering in US elections. Isolated cases exist per Heritage Foundation data. Many countries like Switzerland, UK, and Australia use postal voting successfully. Abolition could limit participation; stronger safeguards might address issues without full removal. What's your take?

PSA: If you hit play on “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins at 11:56:20PM this New Year’s Eve, the drum fill will welcome you into 2026. Start the year the right way. 📸 Terry O’Neill

@elonmusk People also say that about collective bargaining, too. Hmm. 🤔

The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people

Friday Illustration by John Holcroft

@Grady_Booch Ok. Thats cool.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity. Let’s define “laziness” anew—to endure a non-ideal existence, to let circumstance or others decide life for you, or to amass a fortune while passing through life like a spectator from an office window. The size of your bank account doesn’t change this, nor does the number of hours you log in handling unimportant e-mail or minutiae. Focus on being productive instead of busy.

@brucefloyd I’m sorry. What did you say? I couldn’t pay attention to your entire message. 😉

After years of doing social media work, my attention span is shot.

@jasonfried Very nice @jasonfried. Thank you for writing this.

LOOK BACK LESS One of the reasons companies have a hard time moving forward is because they've tangled themselves in the near past. Eyes aimed backwards rather than ahead, staring at the dark, feet in their own concrete. They've trapped themselves looking for certainty where there isn't any. Searching for actionable advice where there are only guesses. Something sorta went wrong. A project didn't go as planned. Some launch didn't meet expectations. A number someone felt was in reach didn't get hit. So they look back, scanning the ruins for something shiny. They gather people up and call for a search party. They launch into post-mortems and retrospectives. It's a mistake most of the time. And a waste of time almost all of the time. Let's start with when it makes sense. If the process is highly mechanized, isolated, or systematized, then you can look back and find the exact moment when something went wrong. And you don't need to conjure up a "what if" counterfactual, you know for sure this was the point of failure. For example, if you're making widgets, and your small circular disks are coming out as half moons instead, then you can trace the process back, figure out where the stamping went wrong, correct that machine or process, and absolutely 100% fix the issue. If you can do that, by all means do that. Technical downtime can often be perfectly traced like that, too. But so many failed projects subject to retrospectives are searching for reasons where there are only humans to be found. Ever been on one that lasts hours only to determine "next time we need to communicate better"? I bet you have. Or one that says "If we only would have involved QA earlier we would have caught that." Or "Next time we need to be more careful to take seasonal timing into account". Or "designers and programmers need to work more closely together." Or some other generalized platitude, extruded from the retrospective process. There may be truth in the statements, but are they really the reason things didn't go as planned? Really? You sure? And those aren't actually answers, they remain questions without question marks. So now what, specifically? Spending hours of people's time grabbing for something grippy in the box of generalized excuses isn't going to turn up a treasure. And most of the time, reasons are actually mysteries. Or deeper than you can dig. Or too many to count. The world, the work, the market, the customer, the timing, the pressure, the economy at large, the expectations, the hopes and dreams are fuzzy, abstract, and irrational. You can point, but not at a point that's clearly defined enough to make a difference next time. Counterfactuals are deeply satisfying because they can never be proven. They never have to smash into reality. Imagination takes hold, a scapegoat comes into focus, and we can blame it all on the thing we'll never know mattered in the first place. Report written, meeting adjourned! A better path is to reflect forward, not backwards. Develop a loose theory while working on what's next. Appreciate there's no certainty to be found, and put all your energy into doing better on an upcoming project. But how will you do better next time if you don't know what went wrong last time? Nothing is guaranteed other than experience. You'll simply have more time under the curve, and more moments under tension, to perform better moving forward. Internalize as you go, not as you went. If you're any good, you'll simply do better next time because you're better at what you do than you were the last time you did it. That may be murky and unsatisfying for some, but I believe it to be absolutely true. So next time the involuntary instinct kicks in, and the urge to schedule a retro when something didn't go as planned, skip it and skip ahead. There's more to learn looking forward.

@swardley Yep.

FTFY. Unless you're Trump supporters found guilty of ... 1) insurrection 2) wire fraud 3) obstruction 4) trafficking 5) securities fraud 6) ... it's a long list. THEN ...

@swardley Yup. This is like a bad party from the 80’s. There’s going to be quite the hangover.

The damage done to the US, the cheapness at which softpower has been given away is ... remarkable. Not in a good way ->

We’re cooked

Love it