musically_ut

There are two forces here and they point in opposite directions. I wrote about this a few months ago: https://blog.musicallyut.xyz/2026/06/02/the-mote-in-ais-eye....

The one you're describing is the pull down. The AI doesn't need the library as a comprehension aid, so it drops a layer and writes the ten lines it actually needs. There's a second reason it might do this: it doesn't trust code written by other AIs, and pulling the functionality in-house shrinks the surface area it has to reason about.

But there's also a pull up. Writing code is getting cheap; making it hardened may not, and that gap doesn't close just because token prices do. If that holds, the economical arrangement is that someone (OSS or SaaS) ships vetted blocks and each user grows their own feature layer on top with their own agent.

Which means the stack gets taller rather than flatter. The top layer is bespoke per user instead of shared, and the bottom layer matters more, not less, because everyone is depending on the same small set of audited pieces.

Indirectly related to this is this beautiful paper which looks at what motivates people to continue playing versus quitting Chess: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1706530115#:~:text=We%....

> We propose that one’s personal best, or past peak performance, acts as a reference point by inducing effort when current performance would otherwise fall short. Analyzing a massive dataset of online chess games, we find that players exert effort to set new personal best ratings and quit once they have done so.

There is no direct way of measuring the "Personal Best" in all areas of life (unlike Chess), but I believe that one can set benchmarks for oneself without articulating it: be it writing blog posts, making music, creating an OSS project, etc.

Then beating one's own benchmark, even just once, dulls the desire to continue putting in effort. So I can imagine a very similar blog post with the title:

> "I don't like making things which beat my personal best benchmark over and over again."

The post resonates with me as an OSS user and a contributor. Many a brave souls have taken to forking the project to fix the bugs but those forked projects almost always suffer from a discoverability problem. I have tried making fixes and tried forking projects only to discover that someone else has done it better elsewhere.

I've been burned by this problem often enough that I wrote a Chrome extension which would _tell_ me if there are any notable forks of the project I'm currently looking at on GitHub: https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks </self-plug>.

> The world needs more people who are two days into learning something writing about the problems of people who are one day in.

~ https://twitter.com/patio11/status/803825771349426176

Shameless self-plug: I created [anki-slides-import](https://github.com/musically-ut/anki-slides-import) to convert slides into Anki decks.

The program requires notes (written in Markdown, with one section for each slide) along with the pdf slides and it produces a deck which can be practised in Anki. It may prove to be useful for someone here.

Hmm, I agree with you on that. This was my thinking behind appreciate [1], that starring would be a personal token of appreciation rather than an endorsement by the employer.

[1] https://github.com/musically-ut/appreciate

I wrote a Chrome/Firefox extension to address the problem of finding "notable" forks of original repos. These often are community supported version of the original which would have been hard to find otherwise: Lovely Forks ~ https://github.com/musically-ut/github-forks-addon

His definition of success reminds me of Bill Watterson's advice: http://zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoonists...

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Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

-- Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin & Hobbes)