jdkoeckThoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/
I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine.
What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt?
People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.
After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understanding of what you are building does not exceed the reality of the mess you and your team are actually building if budgets allow.
This seldom happens, even in solo hobby projects once you cost everything in.
It's not about agile or waterfall or "functional" or abstracting your dependencies via Podman or Docker or VMware or whatever that nix crap is. Or using an agent to catch the bugs in the agent that's talking to an LLM you have next to no control over that's deleting your production database while you slept, then asking it to make illustrations for the postmortem blog post you ask it to write that you think elevates your status in the community but probably doesn't.
I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was.
Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patterns, not just used established ones over time. This is fine with me, and when we apply the term "engineer" to work, I get a little uneasy, because I think it implies us doing something that most of us really don't want to do. That is, absolutely prove our approach works and will work for years to come. Just my opinion though.
Are We Really Engineers?
This is part one of the Crossover Project. Part two is here and part three is here. A conference talk based on this work is now available here. I sat in front of Mat, idly chatting about tech and cuisine. Before now, I had known him mostly for his cooking pictures on Twitter, the kind that made me envious of suburbanites and their 75,000 BTU woks. But now he was the test subject for my new project, to see if it was going to be fruitful or a waste of time.