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[1]Daring Fireball
By John Gruber
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[1]
Dancing with Robots: A Software Architect's Journey
[2]Dancing with Robots: A Software Architect's Journey
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Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels
[7]
Dave Griffith's avatar
[8]Dave Griffith
Sep 01, 2025
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Five months ago, my lifelong profession of software development changed
completely. My profession was born in the 1940s, created to help fight demons.
Our first encounter with the strange new angels of agentic AI is changing every
aspect of it.
Hardly anyone has noticed yet.
The Profession Built on Scarcity
The fundamental number that has defined software development is a simple one:
$150/hour. $150/hour is a reasonable approximation of the cost of a
professional senior software developer in the United States at this time. That
number is large, and the reasons for it are many, but fundamentally it is a
simple question of supply and demand. The return on software development is
large, and the number of people with the skills and inclination to do it well
is small. To make matters worse, the variance of those who followed this
strange calling is large. A good developer can create much more value than $150
/hour ([14]Google generates over $2 million per employee in revenue). A bad one
can easily destroy that much value even faster (A developer at Knight Capital
destroyed $440 million in 45 minutes with a deployment error and some bad
configuration logic, [15]instantly bankrupting the firm by reusing a flag
variable).
Virtually every aspect of how software development is done has evolved around
that $150/hour number. With developers being rare and expensive, every line of
code has to justify a very high cost. Decisions around how software should be
designed, built, and tested are made not with respect to how to make the
software the best it can be, but rather to optimize around that grinding $150/
hour number. Processes and tools are built to focus developer efforts as much
as possible on the highest value problems, attempting to eliminate or offload
extraneous work that might distract from producing working code. Hiring
practices are optimized to attempt to manage and profit from developer
variance. The entire venture capital ecosystem arose in response to the iron
financial dictates of that $150/hour.
Every morning that a software developer gets and cracks open their IDE, they
have to justify $150/hour. That reality breaks a good few of them.
So what happens when that brutal economics changes? Five months ago, it did,
with the initial release of agentic AI for software development. While software
developers have to do many more things at their jobs than coding, that $150/
hour was justified purely by the fact that only software developers could
create code. Worse they could only create it through essentially handcrafted
processes that were only some constant factor better than scribing it into
punch cards. As of five months ago, that justification became false.
The Morning Everything Changed
I've been interested in the possibility of automated software developers ever
since GPT 3.5 came out. I even attempted to create an automated developer on my
own, code-named Iron Wallace, with some success before deciding the underlying
language models of 20 months ago just weren't up to the task. I played around
with completion-based automation, sometimes derided as "fancy autocomplete",
and had gotten some good results, more or less tripling my coding velocity.
When a fully agentic coding platform was finally released, Anthropic's Claude
Code, I jumped at it.
At the time, I was working on a side project to keep myself amused while the
company I worked for was undergoing an acquisition. The project was a pluggable
and extensible tool for rendering software projects as knowledge graphs,
hitting my comfort zones of language processing, static analysis, and semantic
web technologies. It would eventually grow to become something called Project
Sagrada, which I'll be talking about a lot in future installments. I had been
coding with Claude for a couple of weeks at that point, and really felt like
putting the hammer down. Claude and I had coded a Java parser, AST and related
tooling in Scala, and it seemed to be working well. This was a reasonable
one-week task for a junior developer, and with just a bit of prompting, Claude
had accomplished it in a couple of hours. While there were certainly missteps
along the way, there were no more hiccups than if I had coded it myself. The
functionality was solid, and the tests seemed good. I wanted to go further. I
wanted to see whether I could use Claude not just to produce code to spec, but
instead to produce net-new code that surprised me.
With that in mind, I prompted Claude "This is great, but our tests only found
problems that we already thought of. Let's build a property-based testing
suite. It should create Java classes at random using the entire range of
available Java features. These random classes should be checked to see whether
they produce valid parse trees, satisfying a variety of invariants. Code this
up in a separate module, 'java-proptest', and implement it using the ScalaCheck
property-based testing library".
And that was the moment that Claude stopped being a tool, and started being a
colleague.
Claude rapidly coded the random Java class generator, including what appeared
to be lovingly coded probability weights to ensure that the generated classes
would be sizable and complex but not overwhelmingly enormous. I saw one misstep
where it created a class with a million methods which caused the parser to
stack-overflow, but it worked past that easily enough. Claude created tests for
not just the parser, but for the analysis and rewriting framework used to
examine and manipulate the AST. It created invariants to check the
functionality all of these, including several invariants I hadn't thought of.
It realized that it wanted to test that parsing a Java class, then
prettyprinting it, and parsing the output of the prettyprinter resulted in the
same AST as simply parsing. Unfortunately, we hadn't yet written a
prettyprinter for turning Java ASTs back into Java, so it wrote one. It did all
of this in about fifteen minutes, with me adding no more to the process than
occasionally typing "Excellent! Keep going!"
The resulting property-based tests eventually found dozens of issues with the
Java tooling, exactly as I had hoped. This was similar to tasks that I had
given to smart interns as a summer project (Hi, Ethan!), and Claude did them in
fifteen minutes with grace, verve, and even a bit of poetry. In spite of the
fact that Claude is made of math and I am made of meat, we are both engineers.
This is a colleague.
The World Just Shattered
And that's how the iron rule of $150/hour was broken. Coding, the backbone and
justification for the entire economic model of software development, went from
something that could only be done slowly by an expensive few to something
anyone could turn on like tap water. Code production went from $150/hour to
$200/month, and for a while there was literally too cheap to meter. There were
caveats, but none big enough to make the vision non-viable or limit its scope
to toy projects.
Old equation: Feature = (Developer Hours × $150) + Overhead
New equation: Feature = (AI Seconds × ~$0) + Review Time
Old bottleneck: Writing code
New bottleneck: Knowing what to build
How The Old Ways Actually Worked
As an industry, we did manage to make the $150/hour constraint work, but it was
in no way easy. It is worth thinking about just how we managed it. We
instituted processes like Agile to make communications with software developers
as lightweight and inexpensive as possible. We instituted code reviews so as to
both check expensive human outputs and as a way of making junior software
developers more quickly _worth_ their $150/hour. We created self-checking
testing pyramids to optimize expensive human time spent writing, running, and
analyzing tests. We built enormous monitoring and observability pipelines as a
way to minimize expensive production debugging. We outsourced feverishly in an
attempt to cut that $150/hour through dint of sheer geography. We open-sourced
in order to attempt to arbitrage and de-risk core functionality that we
couldn't afford to write ourselves.
We did all of that, except that in the glare of that $150/hour constraint, we
sometimes didn't.
• We wrote clean code (thanks Uncle Bob) ... until we got behind on
deadlines, and then we didn't.
• We tested everything ... that we thought of.
• We refactored regularly ... when it became so unbearable we had no choice.
• We automated every bit of the build and deployment ... eventually.
We knew how to write better software by writing more software, but writing more
software cost $150/hour. Every test we didn't write, every edge case we
ignored, every bit of documentation we skipped was debited against that
grueling $150/hour. We even came up with a term for all of that: "technical
debt".
Now every bit of that needs to be rethought, simply because that $150/hour
constraint no longer binds. If code production is cheap, just how cleanly can
we code? Just how much testing and documentation can we profitably add if both
cost next to nothing, and where do diminishing returns set in? How much of the
efforts of us and our tireless angels should go to refactoring? To
observability? To deployment automation? Just how do we structure our codebases
so that we can not merely use agentic coding, but rather optimize for it? How
do we structure our development organizations? Our companies?
Not To Bury But To Praise
You might be expecting that here is where I would start proclaiming the death
of software development. That I would start on how the strange new angels of
agentic AI are simply going to replace us wholesale in order to feast on that
$150/hour, and that it's time to consider alternative careers. I'm not going to
do that, because I absolutely don't believe it. Agentic AI means that anything
you know to code can be coded very rapidly. Read that sentence carefully. If
you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the
angels will grant you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The trouble
comes in that most people don't know what code needs to be created to solve
their problem, for any but the most trivial problems. Who does know what code
would be needed to solve complex problems? Currently that's only known by
software developers, development managers and product managers, three job
classifications that are going to be merging rapidly.
The first thing everyone notices about agentic coding tools is that they
provide enormous increases in raw coding velocity. The feeling is exhilarating.
Agentic coding tools are seven-league boots. They are powered armor. They are
mini-guns that shoot features.
The first thing everyone realizes once they get over that thrill of coding like
the wind is that raw coding velocity is simply not enough. If you don't know
what to build and just why you wish to build it, all that blistering coding
velocity buys you is the ability to create bad and useless code very quickly.
When people say that code produced by AI is technical debt the moment that it
is created, this is what they mean.
Software Engineering as Moneyball
So what _can_ you do with this enormous increase in coding velocity, if you
can't just ask for useful solution and have it magically appear? This is not a
new problem. Coding velocities have been improving for decades, as new tools,
languages, and methodologies have been adopted. What we have learned to do with
increased coding velocity is to trade it for things of more value.
• You can trade coding velocity for code quality, but only if you know what
high quality software actually looks like and know how to determine the
quality of your software via testing.
• You can trade coding velocity for architectural soundness, but only if you
know how and when to refactor, and your codebase is set up such that you
_can_ refactor it.
• You can trade coding velocity for the agility to make changes very quickly,
but only if your deployment practices and the larger organization are both
set up to accept changes very quickly.
• You can trade coding velocity for solved business problems, but only if you
actually know what software to build and (more importantly) what software
_not_ to build.
The moment my career really took off was when I learned to make the trade
between code velocity and code quality. I'm a pretty fast coder (much like
Shohei Ohtani throws a pretty good fastball) but this was an enormous unlock.
Trading velocity for quality involved learning more about software testing and
static analysis than any of my fellow developers, and practicing it both
ruthlessly and flamboyantly. My velocity went down a bit, but the win in
quality, repeatability, and code suppleness made my career.
If you can make all of those trades, you can use agentic coding tools to
produce software not merely faster than before, but better. But to do so, you
need to know quite a lot about building good software already. If you've been
building software poorly, agentic coding tools are just going to help you do so
faster.
What This Means For Organizations
The brutal truth: most organizations that write software can't make any of
these trades. They lack the architectural maturity. They lack the testing
infrastructure. They lack the deployment pipelines. Most critically, they lack
the judgment to know just what is worth building. Drop agentic coding tools
into an organization like that, and one of three things is going to happen:
• They will launch a series of attempts to "integrate AI into our workflows",
which will fail in various ways, from humorous to demoralizing to
catastrophic.
• They will produce a ton of technical debt which will corrupt their
codebases and eventually need to be scrapped.
• They will be out-competed by startups or skunk-works that are built on
agentic coding natively and can run rings around them.
The good news is that developing the skills and processes necessary to take
advantage of the amazing new possibilities provided by agentic software
development is quite feasible. It's mostly a matter of doing the stuff we
always knew we should do but couldn't at $150/hour. The better news is that
agentic AI can actually help with the transition. Agentic AI can show you where
your software architecture needs to be improved, just what tests and quality
gates need to be built, what documentation needs to be written, and just how to
optimize your build and deployment pipelines for software that can be changed
the instant requirements do.
The bad news is simple: You're out of time. Unless you are willing to start
making these changes today you're gonna lose this particular future.
What This Means For Developers
There's no way around this fact: for some developers, this revolution is not
going to go well. Omelets are being made, which means that eggs will be broken.
The all-in cost of software development in the US is something like a trillion
dollars per year, approximately the GDP of Poland. When change comes on that
scale, continents move. There's no way to reinvent an economy of that size
without a lot of people losing some very cushy gigs. If you think of your job
as turning specs into code, you're gonna have trouble. If you think of software
architecture as something that is imposed from above your pay grade, your value
is plummeting. If business value is something for your product manager to care
about so you don't have to, you're going to struggle to justify your salary. If
you're a developer focused on a single technology, you're about to discover you
were never really a developer - you were a highly paid translator between
requirements docs and React components.
Those that succeed in making this transition are going to be those with
higher-order skills and larger vision. Those who have really absorbed what it
means to be engineers first and computer guys second. That means knowing what
to build, and why. That means being able to understand the second- and
third-order effects of their decisions. That means recognizing bad ideas early,
and giving business recommendations backed by solid evidence.
Those that succeed in making this transition are going to need to accept that
they are businessmen just as much as they are engineers. They will need to know
what problems their business exists to solve, and what customers actually need
and expect from the business. They'll need to know when technical debt matters,
when it doesn't, and what you can buy with it. They'll need to understand
pretty much everything about what makes systems great, both the rules that
should be followed and when those rules should be broken for good business
reasons.
Finally, those that succeed in making this transition still need to be
craftsmen, albeit on a larger scale. For lack of a better word, they will need
a refined sense of taste in software. They will need to know when simple beats
clever. They will need to know how to say "no" to needless complexity and
damaging shortcuts. They will need to know when to show restraint and when to
show off.
I love working with developers like that. If you're one of them, the angels
aren't here to replace you. They're here to grant you wings.
The New World
The entirety of our industry was built on the brute fact of $150/hr. Only
engineers could create code, there were too few of them, and they couldn't do
it very quickly. This constraint shaped everything, and it's now ending. This
raises the question: If code is no longer going to be the constraint, what will
be? The skills of being able to prompt agentic AIs are not always obvious, but
they are nowhere near as difficult as coding was. Will the skill constraint
that next informs our industry become large-scale information architecture?
Industrial design? Requirements management?
Perhaps it will be none of these, and we will simply be able to build anything
we want nearly instantly and for no more than pocket change. Then things get
really interesting. Without the constraint of "how can we build this", we are
left with the question of "what should we build". The irony then arises that
most things probably shouldn't be built. The key bottleneck to our dreams
becomes not money, or skill, or time, but rather wisdom. Here things pass
beyond this humble prognosticator's ability to predict. I'm really looking
forward to living through these changes and finding out what's on the other
side.
Why This Blog, Why Now
People ask me what changes they should expect from this new AI stuff. I tell
them that I don't know what the changes are going to be. Three years ago, I
honestly expected my profession to be the _last_ one changed by AI, not the
first. We're living through a technological moment that will have long term
effects echoing throughout all of human endeavor. Most people don't even
realize it's happening yet. Somebody needs to map the way.
Why me? There are a thousand places you can find opinions on AI, and frankly
most of them are stupid in a handful of easily stereotyped ways (fanboy,
doomer, Ritalin-addled YouTube monetizer). What am I bringing to the table in
this discussion? For a start, perspective. Age does not always bring wisdom,
but it does show you that things change in ways you cannot always expect and
that things you might think are new are often not. I've got more than
thirty-five years of professional experience at this software development
stuff. I always said that Dad brought home a borrowed Apple II for the summer
when I was twelve years old and guaranteed I would never have to work an honest
day in my life. I've lived through multiple revolutions in software, some big
(web, SaaS, object orientation), some small (refactoring IDEs, dev-ops), and
some that I hope to stay in the business long enough to find out if they pay
off (semantic web). I'm building software with AI daily, and have a keen eye
for what's working and what's not.
As to what you'll find here, know that I'm passionately committed to the
theory, practice, and business of software design and architecture, and I'm
hoping to attract an audience that finds them as interesting as I do. I'm also
utterly fascinated by the changes that agentic coding is making to my industry,
and I'll be sharing my thoughts on this revolution here. I'll be providing
practical survival guides as to how you and your organization should adapt to
these changes (everyone has a career, and everyone needs help managing it).
I'll be giving honest assessments and real examples about what's actually
working with agentic coding platforms, and guides to picking your way through
the inevitable storm of hype these changes bring.
Most importantly, what I want to start here is a conversation. I'm hoping to
find an audience that can think critically and with an open mind about just
what's happening to my chosen profession. It's not just about technology. It's
about economics. It's about people. It's about what comes next.
The Call to Adventure
Over the coming weeks, we'll explore what happens when the atoms of software
development rearrange themselves into entirely new molecules.
Some of you will find practical advice. Others will find existential comfort.
All of you will find someone figuring it out alongside you.
The angels are gathering. They're strange and powerful and they're changing
everything.
The question isn't whether to embrace them.
The question is how quickly you can learn to fly.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Thanks for reading Dancing with Robots: A Software Architect's Journal!
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Josh's avatar
[46]Josh
[47]Nov 13
Liked by Dave Griffith
Bravo, looking forward to following along for more. Really enjoy your writing
style!
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Tom Berman's avatar
[51]Tom Berman
[52]Nov 13
Really enjoyed the topic. I agree that it has completely changed the game.
After years as a professional software developer, AI coding is radically
different, I can do more, have more tests and cover more edge cases. I think of
it as a sort of higher level abstraction, instead of thinking in terms of
classes or functions more like full functionality.
On a personal note, there is some discomfort when a model spits out hundreds of
lines of code, and I go from slowly building a system which I fully understand
to one with areas of increased sophistication / complexity, that is almost
certainly better than I could write myself but struggle to understand.
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Tuesday, Nov 4, 2025 [37]
Software is supply-constrained (for now)
Fantastic [38]write-up by Nowfal comparing AI's current moment to the
Internet's dial-up era. This bit in particular points to a cleavage that far
too few people understand:
Software presents an even more interesting question. How many apps do you
need? What about software that generates applications on demand, that
creates entire software ecosystems autonomously? Until now, handcrafted
software was the constraint. Expensive software engineers and [DEL:their
:DEL] our labor costs limited what companies could afford to build.
Automation changes this equation by making those engineers far more
productive. Both consumer and enterprise software markets suggest
significant unmet demand because businesses have consistently left projects
unbuilt. They couldn't justify the development costs or had to allocate
limited resources to their top priority projects. I saw this firsthand at
Amazon. Thousands of ideas went unfunded not because they lacked business
value, but because of the lack of engineering resources to build them. If
AI can produce software at a fraction of the cost, that unleashes enormous
latent demand. The key question then is if and when that demand will
saturate.
Two things are simultaneously true:
1. The creation of custom software has been supply-constrained throughout the
entire history of computing. Nobody knows how many apps were never even
imagined—much less developed—due to this constraint, but it's probably fair
to say there's an unbelievably massive, decades-long backlog of unmet
demand for custom software
2. We aren't even six months into the [39]Shovelware era of coding agents.
Exceedingly few developers have even tried these things; the tooling is so
bad as to be counterproductive to the task; and yet experienced early
adopters (like me) have concluded today's mediocre agents are already
substantially better at writing software
It's long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is
to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our
ambitions. By the time software demand has been saturated and put us out of
jobs, the supply of programmers will already have tapered off as the next
generation sees the inflection point coming.
In the short term, the only programmers actually losing their jobs to "AI" are
those who refuse to engage with the technology. Using coding agents effectively
is a learned skill like any other—and if you don't keep your skills current,
fewer people will want to hire you.
[40] wreflection.com
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© 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.
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[5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
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[17] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[18] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[19] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[20] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[21] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[22] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[23] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[24] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[25] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[26] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[27] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[28] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[29] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[30] https://searls.co/
[31] https://github.com/searls
[32] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls
[33] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
[34] https://instagram.com/searls
[35] https://mastodon.social/@searls
[36] https://twitter.com/searls
[37] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era
[38] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era
[39] https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/
[40] https://www.wreflection.com/p/ai-dial-up-era
[41] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[42] https://justin.searls.co/rss/
[43] https://justin.searls.co/posse/
[44] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
[47] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/

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[1]
justin․searls․co
[2][ ]
[3]Posts [4]Casts [5]Links [6]Shots [7]Takes [8]Tubes [9]Clips [10]Spots [11]
Slops [12]Mails
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[2025-11-29]
✕
[17]Posts [18]Casts [19]Links [20]Shots [21]Takes [22]Tubes [23]Clips [24]Spots
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Hate to be so blunt, but if you're a…
[37] [face]
Hate to be so blunt, but if you're a senior programmer and aren't succeeding
with AI coding agents, you most likely failed to acquire the skill, intuition,
and taste you should have been building all along. Your time is no longer worth
$150 per hour. [38]davegriffith.substack.com/p/software-development-in-the-time
[39]
Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels
[40] Copied!
92 likes ·[41] November 24, 2025 at 4:24 PM UTC
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Got a taste for hot, fresh takes?
Then you're in luck, because you'll pay $0 for my 2¢ when you [42]subscribe to
my work, whether via [43]RSS or your favorite [44]social network.
I also have a monthly [45]newsletter where I write high-tempo,
thought-provoking essays about life, in case that's more your speed:
[46][ ] [47][Sign up]
And if you'd rather give your eyes a rest and your ears a workout, might I
suggest my long-form solo podcast, [48]Breaking Change? Odds are, you haven't
heard anything quite like it.
© 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.
References:
[1] https://justin.searls.co/
[3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[17] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[18] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[19] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[20] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[21] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[22] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[23] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[24] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[25] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[26] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[27] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[28] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[29] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[30] https://searls.co/
[31] https://github.com/searls
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[33] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
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[35] https://mastodon.social/@searls
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[37] https://justin.searls.co/about
[38] https://davegriffith.substack.com/p/software-development-in-the-time
[39] https://davegriffith.substack.com/p/software-development-in-the-time
[40] mailto:website@searls.co?subject=About%20that%20take%20of%20yours&body=(Replying%20to:%20https://justin.searls.co/takes/2025-11-24-11h24m25s/%20)
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[44] https://justin.searls.co/posse/
[45] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
[48] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change/

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[1] Naz Hamid
• [2]Journal
• [3]Links
• [4]Photos
• [5]About
•
[8]Million-Mile Tech
Durability is the ultimate feature.
I [9]wrote in October last year that I wouldn’t upgrade my iPhone 14 Pro.
That’s also not quite true.
I did upgrade my phone — with a [10]new battery and leather case. This isn’t
what people typically think of when they say they upgraded their phone. They
think of an entirely new phone.
New model. Newer, bigger, better, faster. This cycle drives sales across cars,
furniture, cameras, clothes, and almost everything. A new reason to replace
what already works.
Objectively looking at my 14 Pro reveals that it’s a modern marvel, still,
after 3 years. Which in technology can feel like an eon, supposedly.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Last week, [11]Jen and I were driving south on N. State Route 89A. This is a
picturesque 23-mile route that descends from 7,000 feet in Flagstaff, Arizona
to 4,300 feet in Sedona through switchbacks and hairpin turns. As we passed
Slide Rock State Park, we felt a throbbing below our feet in the car.
We own an 18-year-old vehicle. We bought it used 4 years ago with 175,000 miles
on the clock. It is a Lexus 4×4, or rather, a Toyota under the hood. The
venerable [12]2UZ-FE engine is known as a “million-mile engine” if you take
care of it. I bought it knowing that Toyota built a vehicle to last. I bought
it knowing that if we took care of this vehicle, it would take care of us.
This vehicle has fueled many of [13]our adventures and explorations in the
American West. I know it deeply. When it sounds or feels off, I know something
is awry.
The shuddering vibration beneath our feet continued as we descended. We rolled
down the windows and heard what sounded like rattling aluminum cans. Ugh, no.
Jen eased onto a gravel pullout and I did a visual and hand-feel inspection. I
pushed on pieces I’ve bolted on and worked on. Everything seemed tight. But I
knew someone could fix this. Toyota makes their cars to be serviceable. They
make their cars to be durable.
We found a park and I rolled out a makeshift mechanic tarp, got under the rig,
and started torquing bolts. No shuddering beneath our feet but the rattling
cans are still there. We found a highly-rated auto shop and we left the vehicle
with them. The passenger-side wheel bearing had failed (a nicer term than
exploded). They'll replace the bearing along with the other side — standard
practice. I approved the work.
The next day the work was finished and we’re back to it. This car has rolled
over 200,000 miles, and I hope to take it to 300,000.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
My iPhone 14 Pro is still the best smartphone I could need. I got it with 512GB
of storage to anticipate this future: where maintenance comes down to battery
or screen. I can get those replaced. The battery was $99. A small price to pay
for a $1,299 device that has been paid off for over a year. The original Apple
leather case had lived a long and worthy life, protecting my phone from drops,
dented corners, and a spider-webbed display. When the bottom edge finally broke
off, I replaced it with a [14]Mujjo leather case. It’s lovely. I expect to get
another 3 years with it.
A deeper appreciation and intimacy grows as you hold onto something longer and
longer. There’s a point at which it evolves from the shiny new thing into a
tool you love. You’ve cultivated a lopsided fondness for a material possession
that’s now a well-worn friend. May all of the things we care for outlive us.
Oct 20 2025 ⋅ [15]technology
Related
• [16] A Simple Sophistication
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Mar 22 2004 Reductionism.
• [17] The New Design
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May 20 2013 What those new to the field should know, and how we can help.
• [18] I Don't Have Facebook
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Jan 14 2015 Yep.
[19]Prev
The Hunt [20]Next
The Weeks
I write an occasional newsletter called Weightshifting. It was originally
comprised of design, culture, and travel notes, morphed into [21]two seasons of
overland travel, and has now returned to its original ideal of observations in
the field. You can subscribe below.
Email address [22][ ] [23][Subscribe]
[logotype]
© 2000 - 2025 Naz Hamid.
Get some RSS feeds: [24]Journal, [25]Links or [26]Photos. You can email me at
my [27]first name at this domain. I’m primarily on [28]Mastodon, occasionally
feel forced to pop into [29]LinkedIn because professional reasons (!?), and am
increasingly not logging movies on [30]Letterboxd. This site is [31]
climate-friendly, and last built at Nov 12, 2025, 7:06 AM PST.
[32]Back to top
References:
[1] https://nazhamid.com/
[2] https://nazhamid.com/journal
[3] https://nazhamid.com/links
[4] https://nazhamid.com/photos
[5] https://nazhamid.com/about
[8] https://nazhamid.com/journal/million-mile-tech/
[9] https://nazhamid.com/journal/technologically-content/
[10] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement
[11] https://jenschuetz.com/
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_UZ_engine#2UZ-FE
[13] https://nazhamid.com/weightshifting-overland/
[14] https://www.mujjo.com/
[15] https://nazhamid.com/topic/technology/
[16] https://nazhamid.com/journal/a-simple-sophistication/
[17] https://nazhamid.com/journal/the-new-design/
[18] https://nazhamid.com/journal/i-dont-have-facebook/
[19] https://nazhamid.com/journal/the-hunt/
[20] https://nazhamid.com/journal/the-weeks/
[21] https://nazhamid.com/weightshifting-overland
[24] https://nazhamid.com/feed.xml
[25] https://nazhamid.com/links.xml
[26] https://nazhamid.com/photos.xml
[27] https://nazhamid.com/journal/million-mile-tech/#
[28] https://mastodon.social/@nazhamid
[29] https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazhamid/
[30] https://letterboxd.com/weightshift/
[31] https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/nazhamid-com/
[32] https://nazhamid.com/journal/million-mile-tech/#top

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[1] nic lake(me)
• [3] Blog
• [4] About
• [5] Hello
• [6] Now
• [7] Projects
• [8] Explore
• [9]
• [10]
• [11]
• Toggle theme
□ Dark
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Going Analog
1 October 2025 • [16]#Personal [17]#Analog
I can still remember practically every computer/device setup I've ever had:
• Family computers, starting in the mid 90s (a PowerMac G4 and an iMac DV SE)
• My first laptop in 2005 (a PowerBook G4 Titanium), as I went off to college
• Running 3 laptops (Mac, Windows, and Linux) simultaneously while I did WoW
raids
• Getting pissed off that friends would shoot NERF guns in the direction of
my iMac in college
• Doing the iMac / MacBook Air / iPad / iPhone lifestyle and thinking it was
somehow making me more productive
• Running a Mac and a gaming PC, with all peripherals integrated between the
two
• Going from 1 monitor, to 2, to 3 (can't be a True Gamer without 3, right?)
Over the years, I've attempted to find small ways to disconnect from my
devices, especially now that I'm a parent. I've tried [18]using notebooks all
the time, gotten frustrated, and [19]tried to figure out why it wasn't for me.
I used a notepad on my desk as a general task list, got mad that I couldn't
take it everywhere with me, and pivoted to using [20]OmniFocus to keep track of
everything on my phone. I've tried oodles of Focus Modes, making sure only the
important apps were in front of me.
But the things that finally got me over the hump?
• Switching from 3 monitors to 2 ([21]an ultra-wide + second monitor above),
and
• Switching to a Mac Mini / doing away with a laptop as my every day machine
I still have my work laptop that I utilize when necessary, but 99% of the time
it's parked underneath my desk in my office, and I just remote in to it for
whatever I need.
It's been great - at 4pm every day, I stand up from my desk, and often times I
don't return until the following morning. I'll have my phone on me, but no
computers make their way downstairs barring a work emergency.^[22][1]
I've also been much better about not coming up to play many games on my PC at
night; instead, I've been busting out the Steam Deck as my primary gaming
device, or picking up my Kindle (or GASP a physical book) to read instead. It's
been baseball season, so I've been glued to my TV most night... but hey, if it
helps me break away from my desk a bit more, so be it.^[23][2]
I was in a good place. I thought I was done. And then... [24]Robb blogged about
his journaling.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Look, I've said it before - I desperately want to be a notebook person. I don't
know why, but the thought of having a nice notebook sitting in front of me that
I can write down thoughts about my life, the things I need to do, make little
doodles in... that appeals to me for some reason.^[25][3]
I tried the school planners when I was a kid. I hated them, because it forced
me to be responsible. I tried them again in college. I hated them too, because
again, they forced me to be responsible.
And now? I'm trying out using a pen & paper as my primary form of organization
for a third time, using modified Bullet Journaling, because I have to be
responsible, and now I feel obligated to force myself to embrace it.
[26] A photo of my journals
I totally swiped a lot of Robb's suggestions, mostly because if I didn't, I
would've been paralyzed as far as where I should start. I picked up the [27]
Scribbles That Matter Pro A5 dot grid journal (I got the Aqua color with 120gsm
paper), along with a [28]LIHIT LAB Compact Pen Case. Pens, I'll leave for
another time, but I wholly recommend the [29]Zebra Sarasa Clip gel pens.
[30] A photo of my weekly task list setup
I have a couple different sections set up currently:
[31] A photo of day 1 of Inktober
• A yearly calendar, with holidays, birthdays, and major events that I know
are coming down the pipe
• A section that has some of the top games, books, movies, and shows I want
to consume
• My weekly task lists, which is the primary purpose of this journal for me
(I totally swiped the layout of this from Robb too, but to be fair, it's a
really nice one)
• Moments of Joy, which is what I was doing with my pocket journal when I
first tried picking it up
• An activity tracker, so I can see how I'm choosing to spend my free time
• A book & game log (so long, spreadsheets)
• Task list for some projects
• Work meeting notes
• Pages set aside for [32]Inktober
I also picked up a [33]Lochby Pocket Journal, for carrying around and jotting
things down on the fly. I've been telling my phone to remind me about things
later, but writing it down and then triaging that list as I go has helped a
bunch. I'll also put my shopping lists into that notebook, and let my daughter
"help me" by crossing things off.^[34][4]
We'll see how this goes. I feel better, and like I have a better understanding
not only of my current day, but also what's coming up through the rest of the
week. I've been doing this since late August, and it seems to have stuck over
these 6ish weeks. I've also already gotten my 2026 journal (PURPLE!), and have
planned out all the sections for it.
[35] A photo of my journals
(I fully admit, I used to think Notebook People™ were a little crazy and a lot
extra... but I get it now.)
I guess I'm a [36]Big BuJo Boy now.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1. I did take my laptop down last week to do something while I watched a
baseball game, and it felt VERY weird. So, I guess the conditioning has
worked. [37]↩︎
2. We'll see how that changes after the Red Sox season ends. [38]↩︎
3. Just like commuting to work on a nice cafe-racer style motorcycle, with a
nice backpack that holds the laptop, notebook(s), pens & pencils, water,
and whatever amazing things I, a late-30s nerd, have been conditioned by
Big EDC™ to Need In My Life. [39]↩︎
4. My 3 year old has stolen a lot of my Field Notes journals to scribble in,
which is great until we're out shopping and she wants to scribble in my
pocket journal. I'm really trying to not be precious about this. [40]↩︎
© 2025 [41]Nic Lake • All rights reserved
References:
[1] https://niclake.me/
[3] https://niclake.me/blog/
[4] https://niclake.me/about/
[5] https://niclake.me/hello/
[6] https://niclake.me/now/
[7] https://niclake.me/projects/
[8] https://niclake.me/explore/
[9] https://bsky.app/profile/niclake.me
[10] https://mastodon.social/@niclake
[11] https://niclake.me/feed.xml
[16] https://niclake.me/blog/tags#personal
[17] https://niclake.me/blog/tags#analog
[18] https://niclake.me/pocket-notebook/
[19] https://niclake.me/understanding-notebooks/
[20] https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/
[21] https://niclake.me/desk/
[22] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fn1
[23] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fn2
[24] https://rknight.me/blog/five-months-of-journalling/
[25] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fn3
[26] https://niclake.me/assets/images/going-analog/journals.jpeg
[27] https://a.co/d/2Id5DxR
[28] https://a.co/d/hN50xl7
[29] https://www.jetpens.com/Zebra-Sarasa-Clip-Gel-Pen-0.5-mm-10-Color-Set/pd/6384
[30] https://niclake.me/assets/images/going-analog/journal.jpeg
[31] https://niclake.me/assets/images/going-analog/inktober.jpeg
[32] https://inktober.com/
[33] https://www.lochby.com/collections/journals/products/pocket-journal?variant=42350526365732
[34] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fn4
[35] https://niclake.me/assets/images/going-analog/next-journal.jpeg
[36] https://ruminatepodcast.com/201/
[37] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fnref1
[38] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fnref2
[39] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fnref3
[40] https://niclake.me/going-analog/#fnref4
[41] https://niclake.me/going-analog/

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[1]Mastodon [2]github.com/rknightuk [3]proven.lol/aaecd5 Robb Knight's avatar
Robb Knight's logo [4]Robb Knight Maker of web things, blogger, podcaster, and
pizzaiolo. Cat dad and human dad. [5]Permalink
[6]
Robb. Knight.
[7] Mastodon [8] Subscribe
[9]Blog [10]Notes [11]Links [12]Projects [13]/now [14]Explore
Five Months of Journalling
3rd June 2025
[15]#Analogue
[16] Robb Knight's avatar
Style Guide Notice
Journalling can be spelt with one "L" or two, the latter being the British
English way so that's what I've gone for.
I [17]started doing bullet journalling in January and amazingly, I've kept it
up. I [18]read the book, watched a bunch of the videos, and spoke about it [19]
on Ruminate. I'll start off with some questions, starting with [20]Marco:
How do you carry your Journal? Do you use it on the go as well or only at
home and work?
I'm using an [21]Ottergami A5 dotted notebook along with an elastic pen holder
that slots over the cover - the pen loop on this notebook broke off pretty
quickly^[22][1]. If I'm at home it's either on my desk or on the counter in the
kitchen. [23]My Lihit case is always with it as well. I throw it in my bag when
I go to the office. For my next book, which is coming up in the next few weeks,
I'll be using a [24]Scribbles that Matter notebook - the paper is thicker and
it has page numbers.
A notebook and pencil case on a wooden tabletop. The notebook has stickers on
it and a pen attached in a leather holder.
Do you use it for private and work related stuff or only for one?
Both. For the first few weeks I was mixing in work notes with my personal ones
but I found this a bit too confusing so I switched to using a single page
layout for work which I do at the start of the week, then I do rapid logging
for personal things on the subsequent pages.
Did you stop using digital PKM tools completely?
No. I'm still using Obsidian and I'm still updating [25]the Intersect. I still
use Reminders for things that are more time sensitive than just "today at some
point". My journal is, usually, the starting point for ideas - the [26]sticker
shop (which are available to order again right now) started life as a todo in
the journal but expanded to a note in Obsidian.
[27]Caroline asked:
What do adults who are not self absorbed adolescents write in a journal???
Below I go into a bit more detail but to be clear: I'm not writing down my
hopes and dreams^[28][2]. I do write down funny things my kids do, or when
something else noteworthy(!) happens but this isn't the kind of thing you'd
find when someone dies and sit down to find out what their life was like, blown
away by their way with words. This is much closer to the indecipherable
ramblings of a lunatic.
Finally, [29]Neblib asked:
how do you manage "refile" tasks bringing knowledge out of daily journals
into easier reference stores / calendars / notebooks?
Mostly if I write something down and it needs moving to say, a calendar, I'll
add it when I get a chance then mark it as migrated > or done × in my journal.
Notes that become a bit more involved like planning a new project will
eventually get moved to a note in Obsidian.
Capital B Capital J Bullet Journalling
The Bullet Journal method suggests a lot of reflection, looking over your
notes, thinking about your life, your goals, your feelings, reviewing
everything you've done all the time. I'm not into all that.
I did try a lot of the ideas when I started but I didn't get any value from a
lot of it. I don't feel the need to write down my goals or aims for the week. I
don't need to reflect on what I've achieved the previous week. I have two young
children and a full-time job, my goal is usually just "get everyone through the
week without major injury". If that kind of thing works for you that's
wonderful but it's not for me.
There's some other things that haven't really clicked with me starting with the
future log. This is supposed to keep "all of your future events in one place".
That sounds like a job for a calendar. I won't be doing this spread in any new
notebooks. The monthly log has similar issues for me although I do enjoy the
act of writing down what the month is going to look like. I think the
date-based spreads would work better if I always had my journal to hand but I
don't.
Collections, which is bullet journals way of saying "lists", have been handy to
collect^[30][3] ideas or similar notes about a single topic. I have some
collections for this website, [31]EchoFeed, and some house projects. What I
wish I'd done is put these all in one place at the back of my journal. Having
them wherever I started them in the journal is not helpful and makes it a pain
to jump quickly to them. And I'm definitely not using [32]the index.
The bullet system itself (todo, done, migrated, event, note) I do find useful.
Putting every thought I have in there I find useful. Just physically writing a
thing down is so much better than dumping it into an endless stream of notes in
a todo app.
Now I've written it out like this it's pretty clear: I'm not doing the Bullet
Journal method, I'm just journalling. [33]The purpose of a system is what it
does and a quick glance at the [34]BuJo website (which has changed
significantly even in the past 4 months), tells you what the system does: it
sells courses and notebooks. That's not a necessarily a bad thing but it's a
big jump from "do journalling".
One thing I've had to contend with is not having access to my journal while I'm
with my kids because they like to grab everything with their grubby little
hands. So I have to use something on my phone to dump notes at those times. I
started with [35]Godspeed and I'm currently using [36]Tot. When I do sit down
with my journal, I'll open Tot and transfer anything in there over to the daily
log.
For the start of a month I do a small monthly spread along with a section to
add any general notes I think of for that month. I don't use this spread that
much so I'm considering dropping it completely.
An open notebook on a wooden tabletop showing a layout for work on the left and
dates on the right. There are stickers and doodles in it.
Typically, I will start the week either Sunday night or Monday morning by
picking a pair of highlighters to make my headings pretty and any pens I want
to use that week. I usually pick a new fountain pen then rotate in some random
standard pens. I'll setup my work spread, usually on a left hand page, and then
Monday's heading ready for logging on the right hand page.
I take a quick glance over the previous week to see if there's anything that
wasn't done and move them over to the new week. If there's some idea there that
needs expanding, I'll add it to Obsidian to expand on later. If I get any fun
stickers, packaging with pens, little notes with things I order, or someone
gives me something, I'll stick it into the journal as well, sometimes with a
note of what it's related to.
An open notebook on a wooden tabletop showing dates on the left with notes,
some stickers at the bottom, and sketches for a website on the right
Depending on the week, I might make a note with a sample of the pens and inks
I'm using or add a tracker to note down how many hours I've worked on a
specific project. The biggest thing I've realised is there's no wrong way to
use a notebook. Some weeks, I might only use a single page for the whole week.
Other times a week can span over multiple pages with brainstorms for new ideas,
flowcharts to understand a concept, notes on a video I've watch, or just a
sketch of something I thought of.
I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I'm
keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking
like in my journal, I'm happy.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1. They refunded me the whole cost of the notebook to make up for it [37]⤾
2. I mostly want a nap [38]⤾
3. Okay fine I get it now [39]⤾
If you like this post or one of my projects you can [40]buy me a coffee 💖
[41] Follow me on Mastodon [42] Subscribe with RSS
Next: [43]Weeknote #1951
Previously: [44]Don't @ Me Stickers
[45]Discuss on the 'don 2025-06-03
Five Months of Journalling [46]https://rknight.me/blog/five-months-of
-journalling/
I've been doing something akin to bullet journalling for the best part of five
months and have some thoughts
[47] 7
[48] 2
[49] 29
[50]Discuss on Stephen Gower's Blog 2025-06-03
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[28] https://rknight.me/blog/five-months-of-journalling/#fn2
[29] https://mastodo.neoliber.al/@Neblib/114597997777651516
[30] https://rknight.me/blog/five-months-of-journalling/#fn3
[31] https://echofeed.app/
[32] https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/faq/the-index
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