2026-01-12
Focusing on friction
I have been trying to remove friction from a few things in my dev/note/task workflows. This process started a few months ago - I had been fighting a losing battle with trying to emulate much of my niche/personalized tooling on my phone and tablet (around things like notetaking and task management in particular). After years of trying to become proficient at typing on my phone and squinting at a tiny shell, I threw in the towel and downsized my personal laptop from a physically large and heavy MacBook Pro M1 (inherited from a previous job) to a newer compact MacBook Air M4. It has been years since I’ve had a smaller laptop, and it has been unbelievable how much more willing I am to crack it open and type away for a few minutes, or read, program, journal, etc. I think that phone factor was just introducing so much friction - trying to build solutions that didn’t lock me in to a monthly subscription/proprietary software, but still integrate nicely with dev tools, well, that was ruining my day and making me not want to do the things I enjoy. Now I’m focusing a lot on removing those little burrs, chips, and smudges from various tools and pipelines. I mentioned recently that I was working on overhauling a bunch of my infrastructure - that’s some of it!
Another factor to this, and one that I am very hesitant to talk much about (because I myself don’t yet know how I truly feel on the matter) is the introduction of some LLM-based tools to help grease those wheels. I don’t have any kind of concrete numbers, other than my Forgejo activity log, but it feels like I have been accomplishing a lot lately. I’ll probably write more on the matter soon, although I have nothing interesting to say.