Weekend plan: migrate authentication to OIDC. Four hours later I’m debugging if I can symlink my way to success with Claude Code, Cursor, and Junie. GPT5 is released, maybe that will just do this for me, time to re-enable my OpenAI account and generate an API key. I learn each tool’s proprietary file formats and locations, MCP configs, keyboard shortcuts, and licensing terms. Which one has reasoning? What’s the TPS? Can I make it stop being such a goddamned sycophant?
(noun) The seemingly endless series of prerequisite tasks that must be completed before you can accomplish your original goal, often leading you far away from what you initially set out to do.
Sarah started by wanting to deploy a simple web app, but first she needed to update her Docker configuration, which required upgrading her local environment, which meant backing up her files, which led to organizing her entire project structure—three hours later, she was still yak shaving instead of deploying.
I’ve long thought that the ability to maintain flow state for hours was the hallmark of a good programmer. I prided myself on being in such a deep state of flow that I would often fail to notice the passing of hours, the setting sun. I would often only reluctantly step away to pee. I would work late into the night, uninterrupted by the world.
As the systems I’ve worked on have become more complex, technologically diverse, and frankly riddled with errors, I’ve realized that what I thought of as “flow” is actually just a state of chasing my own thoughts, trying to immediately fix whatever annoyances or weirdnesses I encounterd, and finishing my days not having completed my initial goals for the day.