Wild that privacy became a feature and not the default. Building in this space too and the no uploads needed angle is surprisingly hard to communicate to users who've been trained to expect everything to live in the cloud.
the cal newport quote in the post is doing a lot of work. the strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout.
fine, but the gym analogy breaks down somewhere. in a gym, the person who actually lifts heavier gets noticed. in software, the person with the right bio and the right network gets noticed, regardless of whether they've ever lifted anything real.
you can spend three years learning compilers properly and have a handful of readers. someone else ships a wrapper on a saturday and lands a pmarca quote tweet by monday.
coding the old way is good for you. i'm not convinced it's what gets you noticed. the strain was never really what got rewarded in the first place.
the real unlock here isn't the design output. it's that non-designers can now have a visual conversation instead of writing a 3 page spec that nobody reads.
half the design problems I've seen weren't bad taste. they were bad communication between the person who knew what they wanted and the person who could build it.
not a bad strategy. one repo that shows you can duct tape commodity hardware together and let an agent handle the workflow beats 50 leetcode solutions on your profile.
the interesting part is the cost ratio. commercial flying probe setups run 5 figures with proprietary software. this is a weekend build that gets you most of the way there for under 500 bucks.
the "stable long-term companion" framing from jwr's comment is the part that sticks with me. every company I've worked with that chased the new shiny ended up spending more time on migrations than on the actual product.
stability is boring to talk about but it's the thing that actually lets small teams survive long enough to win.