2026-04 - W3

Productive procrastination — Max van IJsselmuiden

Guilty as charged! Did lots of side quests, without really be productive 😬

Our brain’s reward system is mainly focused around dopamine. Dopamine is released in response to reward-predictive cues, as found by Schultz in 1998. Immediately available stimuli generate stronger signals than abstract future stimuli. Our brains are trained to respond positively to new stimuli. Starting a new project feels exciting and thrilling because of this. This must be the reason why it’s hard to stick to a habit for a longer period, or why I personally always prefer wearing clothes that are new to me.

Humans have always been interested in the new. It has pointed us towards exploration and innovation.

Stop Using Pull Requests - by Andrea Laforgia

Lots of truths in there. If a company wants to go faster, pull requests must be revisited and use something else to accelerate.

Pull requests, as commonly practised — large changes sitting in async queues for hours or days — are an antipattern for private software teams. Peer-reviewed research shows they catch few bugs. Industry data shows the waiting time they impose constitutes almost all of a change’s lead time. Practitioner experience across dozens of independent voices confirms that better alternatives exist. The alternative is not “no review.” It is better review — built into the process rather than bolted on at the end. Test-driven development builds quality into every line. Trunk-based development keeps changes small and integration continuous. Pair and ensemble programming provide review that is immediate, contextual, and collaborative rather than delayed, decontextualised, and adversarial.

The Harness Tax: The Dead Weight Inside Your Coding Agent

claude code harness is quite token hungry, which is understandable, because it is now victim of its own success, and tries to please everyone, so that means it has to support lots of features. But that does not fit me, so… I much prefer something more minimalist like pi.

Nucleus Nouns - ben-mini

Really interesting point of view.

Nucleus nouns are how I think about apps. Whenever I’m learning an app for the first time, I consciously build out this gravity model. It’s an easy way to cut through the bullshit. I don’t care that your app “optimizes sales efficiency with streamlined processes”. Fuck that. Oh? Your nucleus noun is “Email”? Got it. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Companies with a firm understanding of their nucleus nouns can use them as weapons. They make them part of their brand: ✨ the company that knows X better than anyone else ✨.

I assume we can apply not just on app/company, but maybe in a more general way, for anything we want to convey, e.g. in software, this micro-service is about x and y…

The Spark file

This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy—just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Interesting idea of keeping track to spontaneous ideas, hunches, plans, etc…

It can compound, only if one revisit them regularly.