There are three skills which are becoming increasingly more important as a software engineer in 2026: the ability to context switch, the ability to comprehensively read and the ability to ask questions. I define ability as the act of doing something faster AND with higher quality. We must accept some things are not yet be able to be done by AI. It is still essential that humans are looped in. Either due to lack of context, sensitive information or human communications.
LLMs are functions: they take an input and provide an output. Humans can be thought of functions too: we also do the same things as these LLMs, except we have better context management, an understanding of responsibility if things go wrong and worse general knowledge.
The problem is one person cannot work in parallel like an AI: we must be able to sequentially context switch around the AI to be optimal. One signal of being optimal is us having as little idle time as possible. A skill we need to learn is to be able to switch contexts with as little switching time and as little context loss as possible. This means running multiple AI's at the same time and switching between them as they process their data. An important thing is also knowing what to context switch to next. Does this lack of idle time truly lead to higher quality and quantity output by us?
Additionally, a skill which is becoming more useful for human SWE is reviewing code manually. A friend talked about knowledge debt: the fact that we do not know what our code does is dangerous. They say Mean Time To Recovery increases drastically if we do not know what our code does. Knowledge debt leads to technical debt. This hinges on one major factor: reading more comprehensively. This means reading fast and actually understanding what you read.
Something important is curiosity: asking questions and probing in the right places. LLMs some time do not think of everything, but probing them in the right places (which means not having knowledge debt) cause them to realize things they haven't recognized, either due to their intelligence or bias.
OCD
written 17 days ago
"Yosemite" taken by Chaidhat Chaimongkol
OCD is a disorder. The things it tells you to do is not real. Axiomatically, you know it is not real and you do not have to act on the compulsions. These axioms are based in scientific fact: many people have it and they go through their own cycle of obsession and compulsion. It is well studied that your feelings are derived from a mental disorder. It's like a rollercoaster where you know you're safe but you feel like you are not.
An empirical observation: the more you OCD, the worse you get. It is like you are on a hill with very steep gradients on both sides. The moment you start slipping, the harder it gets to recover. Combined with the two axioms: you should not act on the compulsions, because the more you do it, the worse it gets. The only way to improve is to act like the fear does not exist: do not act on it as it is not real. Even if you are anxious, do not do anything to alleviate the fear. Let the fear be present as it will subside. Breathe. There are times when the anxiety is high, especially due to lack of sleep. So get a lot of sleep. But due to the fact that the more you OCD, the worse it gets, it is better to not perform the compulsions in those times of anxiety: still resist it.
Not believing in it is exceedingly difficult. Not to mention the spikes of anxiety that come from not believing in it. But it must be done. You can give yourself negative punishments whenever you do it. For example, you can pay $1 to charity if you follow it. But, if you are paying $1 to charity, the moment you don't do it, then you're worrying about removing the punishment and therefore lapsing back into OCD. It could be a step to easing the OCD though, to get to a state that is manageable enough whereby you can just stop. Conversely, if you set these goals often, it will undermine the goals if you fail to follow it and lapse back to OCDing.
I think the best way to stop is to show yourself that you can stop under any scenario. This goal needs to be set just once. It's set as a goal on my birthday: an important day. Once it is declared on that day, then there is a special reason to believe it. Any other new rules or "i won't do it after this moment" will degrade that. Being able to stop in any scenario, regardless of how triggering, is the more surefire way that, in the future, you can stop. If you feel like you need to be clean to be in a state to make decisions whether you should or should not OCD, you don't need to: because you said it on your birthday.
It becomes a balance of not making the lapse catastrophic and not making it costless. The $1 thing makes a lapse more catastrophic, but not costless. The birthday thing decreases catastrophic-ness but also decreases the costliness. The ideal solution would be not to assign a price at all to the lapse. When you have the urge to lapse, you should just avoid lapsing: you don't need to consider the cost of "what does this cost me if I do it" -- just don't do it. You can stop under any scenario. It's unreasonable to worry about worrying (or lapsing). If the lapse does not exist (i.e., you do not act), this does not become an issue. So do not act.
Sometimes, the more you reason with OCD, the more surface it can grab on to. Don't reason with it. Just don't do it. You don't need to deliberately face the worst fears, but just face those which appear in your day-to-day life. You know what is right by science. Just stop.
