Another solid week spent trying to get my money's worth out of my Claude Max subscription.
The nice thing with Fable is that it's fast, and it lets you really ship on anything dev related. Sadly not for bug bounty yet.
This week a product I've been waiting on for a couple of years finally came out, and I jumped on it. Can't wait to get it.
What to do while Claude works
I noticed a problem this week, one I have and one a lot of us have. Claude, Codex and the rest are amazing, and you can find thousands of tutorials on how to optimize them, build the best skills, the best setup so they code or hunt bugs for you.
But there's one thing nobody talks about: the waiting while it works. Whatever your setup, once your prompt is sent, it goes off to work. It's like handing a task to your intern who takes their time doing it, and that's completely normal.
The problem is we've gone from a producer lifestyle to a consumer one. We consume what Claude produces for us, and while we wait, we don't really know what to do with ourselves.
A few months ago, a workday meant working, coding, hunting bugs by hand, and by the end of the day you were tired, with that real sense of a job done. These days at the end of the day I can count the number of YouTube videos or episodes I watched instead.
They talked about this on the CTBB podcast too, this loss of meaning, especially with findings that feel a lot less like ours, so there's a lot less excitement. But that's another debate.
Personally, while Claude works, I can scroll Instagram forever, watch YouTube videos, spin up even more Claude sessions.
And I know it's not good, because what am I actually getting out of my day? Sure, I found bugs, I moved my projects forward, but my brain probably shrank a size.
I'm not going to stay pessimistic though, because what we're living through is amazing. I just think you have to adapt your lifestyle and stop constantly chasing instant dopamine.
For example, why not keep hunting by hand on the side while Claude works the same scope? My brain looks for the easy way too much, but it's usually when I really get into it myself that I find the most concrete things.
I could also do smarter things on the side, like reading, writing, or moving forward on projects that actually require thinking. And I'm not blaming anyone, I'm the first to scroll and get caught. So this week I'm going to work on it and watch the results, on my performance and on my brain especially.
Infinite scroll
Speaking of scroll, I want to come back to it. I find it insane how strong the algorithms have gotten at keeping us inside their apps.
We're all affected by it, and even the ones who don't have TikTok or Instagram do it on YouTube Shorts. They know us so well that they know exactly what to show us to make us stay.
The second you have a small passion, you get hit with a wave of content on it, and hits of dopamine. But in the end, what does it give you? Absolutely nothing, an empty feeling in my case.
We do it to pass the time, but we're wasting our time. This system drives me crazy. Especially since we consume a huge amount, and we spend our time consuming instead of producing.
And consuming rarely brings us much. Sure, some videos or films can change your life and make you see new things, but two hours of scrolling has never given me much. And I'm not even the heaviest consumer.
How to fix it? Make yourself want to produce more, like writing, which is a bit what I'm doing here with this blog. Or consume better, I don't really know. Either way we won't beat their algorithm. And even if you set a screen time limit, there's always a bypass and you fall right back into your bad habits.
It's something you have to anchor in yourself. For example not taking your phone with you when you work, or adding as much friction as possible to make it happen.
BusyBar
Another one of my productivity obsessions. It's a project from Flipper, the company behind the Flipper Zero.
It's a device that gives you a timer, lets other people know you're working, that you can build on to show whatever you want and customize endlessly.
They've been building it for several years and it just came out. One thing I really like is that while the timer runs, all the apps you picked are blocked, so you can't get to them.
Sure, all of this was already doable with other apps, but having a nice physical object does it for me. It costs way too much for what it is, and yet I bought it instantly anyway. We'll see if it's just a gadget, another obsession, or if it's actually going to help my daily life. I'll keep you posted!
Have a great end of the week!
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