Some things about SF never change.
Exhibit A: Saturday I ventured over to the Palace of the Legion of Honor mid-morning, and the August fog blanketed the Outer Richmond as we natives expect. Tourists, however, were easy to spot. They were the ones shivering in their shorts and a “SF” fleece jacket that they bought when they got to town and quickly found out SF isn’t a normal CA summer experience.
Exhibit B: the SF Muni buses, each one wrapped in an ad highlighting the latest tech craze. Today, AI tools abound, all promising to make a software developer’s job easier - or maybe not needed at all? Driving to the Legion of Honor I must have seen a dozen different buses and a dozen different AI products. And there’s the irony. The one thing that never changes here in Silicon Valley is that there’s always a new thing rolling right by us.
What these buses don’t tell you is how much context switching your brain will have to endure, how many time sinks you’ll get sucked into running all these different tools, and how much money they’ll collectively cost you.
These buses scream to me how distraction has become our biggest challenge. Every day a new tool is featured. Every day a new AI model is released, a new tech stack is recommended, a new SDLC process is espoused, a new … STOP!
Now more than ever focus matters, and doing fewer things simply and doing them well is what matters.
Focus on some old school basics:
Use a notebook to draft an outline of what you’re trying to build or create, and then write it up in a Google Doc that’s ideally one page (at most two pages) long.
And before you buy some specialized tool, ask how much of the job Google Sheets can already do. Sheets may be the most malleable and valuable piece of software ever created.
See how much you can do and how efficient you can get using Claude projects feeding Claude Code that in turn builds and evolves your app in a GitHub repo.
Push Claude to be a minimalist when it comes to creating your tech stack. How much can you do with open source components, and what does a MVTS (minimum viable tech stack) look like for what you’re doing?
Be absolutely ruthless in selecting and using other tools that Google Docs, Claude, and GitHub can’t replicate. QuickBooks online for managing your finances may be one, Slack might be another (but only if you are working with more than two other people).
I’m sure I’m missing stuff, but I’m trying to stay focused here. And I encourage you to block out the siren song of that new tool you see advertised on the N Judah. Or do what I do when I’m driving around SF and see a Muni bus coming towards me.
Look the other way.
NextPlay>Forward AI Disclaimer: I very actively use artificial intelligence and large language models to generate the content you read here, but I do review it and edit it to make sure it can be generally useful to people who read it. Keep in mind that AI can make mistakes - check important information. Let me know if I make any errors and I will correct them.