sitting at my friends place on a sunday evening, listening to the music, i realised that i was enjoying the radio more than whipping out spotify on my phone. something about the lack of control, the randomness, surprise along with the absence of choice clicked something in me. how "convenience" really means "more tiny decisions that i now have to make"
we are bombarded with micro decisions all day. which song, which playlist, in what order. don't even get me started on choosing what to eat three times a day! some of these choices are trivial and take up mental space which should be protected for real tasks (imo). psychologists call it decision fatigue: more decisions you make, worse your later decisions tend to get.
over the past few weeks i have been running a small experiment: cutting micro decisions that don't actually move the needle of my life. i let the music play on shuffle, use navigation even for familiar routes (tbh this helps with traffic too!) and using a weekly wardrobe to skip thinking of my outfits for the week. it probably won't make much of a difference but you never know until you try.
in that spirit i have chosen to avoid using agent mode while debugging...
yes, manually selecting files into a chat window is "so 2024", but hear me out, it works better most of the times than agent mode.
- it never goes haywire on unrelated code or modules
- i have lesser files/lines of code to review, because i consciously chose them.
- it doesn't go snooping in my env and other files and accidentally delete my db
maybe i'm getting ahead of myself and sooner agent mode will be more polished and work as expected. but till then...i'll stick to manually selecting my modules and files to modify like an ape...
p.s: dellama looks interesting