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Comment by funksta | Hacker News Reader

He actually addressed this recently: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3leuuhotnpk2...

I will add a +1 to your recommendation as well, his blog has been my favourite way to keep up with the AI landscape over the last 18 months. Just the right level of detail and technical depth for me

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Yeah, honestly the answer is mainly not having a proper job (I don't have anyone who can tell me how to spend my time) combined with constructive procrastination: I've not been making nearly as much progress on my main projects over the past couple of months because there's been way too much stuff I want to write about.

I can write fast because I've been writing online for so long. Most short posts take about ten minutes, longer form stuff usually takes one or two hours.

I also deliberately lower my standards for blogging - I often skip conclusions, and I'll publish a piece when I'm still not happy with it (provided I've satisfied myself with the fact checking side of things - I won't dash something out if I'm not certain it's true, at least to the best of my ability.)

I'm hoping to improve my overall balance a lot for 2025. Deliberately ending my at least one post a day blogging streak is part of that: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/ending-a-year-long-post...

One thing I'd love to know - how do you balance time spent "building" vs. time spent "researching"?

The writing, I understand - you do it relatively quickly because of a lot of practice. But I feel like just reading up on the AI news every week takes up a significant amount of time - time that can't be spent researching/building things.

I'm wondering how you balance that.

Having relevant projects is key. My https://llm.datasette.io projects gives me the ideal playground for trying stuff out - any time a new API model comes out I can spin up a new plugin to for LLM, which is a great way to try the model with limited development time (most API plugins are a few dozen lines of code).

I've managed to balance building vs writing a lot better in the past - I lost that balance in November and December, I'm trying to get it back for January.

Oh that's cool. We've been blogging about AI eng recently, but the project is often "try this idea/tool/library in order to write a blog post about it".

Having some kind of standard "I need to integrate this new thing with an existing codebase" makes a great standard project.

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