AI augmentation is often great. I can scale up the wishful thinking and explore more with working, well tested, software at my fingertips. Instant gratification, what is not to like? Well, that working software does not mean anything if I can't explain it to other people.
Allemond, a View on Lac du Verney ©️ Willem van den Ende
I made a prototype and let it sit for over two months.:
Why? Attention is all I need. Focus can be frustrating, because I can't do the other things, but it is also what lets me enjoy holidays and get good results out of my work with clients. I might do some reading, and put some likes on other peoples posts, but authoring blog posts and software doesn't appear to be a good fit just yet. Single tasking, and having the occasional chat on some of the paused ideas seems to be possible.
In addition to focus to work on bigger ideas, I also need to be able to explain them to other people. Chris Matts told me that when he blogs a lot, a good blog post needs conversations with at least four different people before it could turn into something publishable. It appears to work that way for me as well.
After writing Swim the Test I made a prototype for an app playground, where I, or a stakeholder, can click through an application workflow, assuming different roles at each step of the process.
I even wrote a draft blog post about that playground back then. I forgot all about that draft until just now, when I looked through my drafts for the first time in a few months. So this focus thing seems to work ;-). That playground, and what I see as its' mechanics are going to be their own post, but also then I was delaying gratification, at a smaller scale. This is what I wrote the week after Swim the Test as we had friends staying over, and our kids had started their summer holiday:
It is nice to be able to make progress while having friends over. I have learned to not multi-task too much. When a question is too big to answer by prompting a coding agent on my phone, I will just percolate on it. Good designs come from working on them - you have to work for creativity to happen, and from stepping away from the screen and coming back with a fresh perspective.
It is great being able to continue work from my phone, with a coding agent I host on a server elsewhere. It helps me finish threads I started during the day while doing the school run. But I (attempt to) put it away to focus on those around me. I do have a bias to action, but letting ideas simmer is not optional, especially when it comes to a cohesive user experience, and creating ideas that spread.
I had a very busy September (not complaining) and am considering picking up some other software ideas from last year. But the workflow playground comes first, because a lack of clarity in my mind about what the workflows around e.g. a team in a collaborative board app added so much friction that it was easier... to start on something else, and delay the gratification maybe too much.
Focus is great, but it has to find you focusing!
Further Reading
AI Winter on Wikipedia
Choosing a System Metaphor often takes iteration. Work, building, co-creating, explaining to wider audiences, flailing, coming back to it and eventually finding something. I saw the playground metaphor floating around again. It does seem to fit, and aligns with Swift Playgrounds and earlier the Pharo Playground. Only in my playground, we author a sequence of events that have a visual, swim the test style, flow as "Reviewable representation". More about that later, perhaps.