Nobody talks about how to stress test that law and actually turn it into your advantage. I’ve found the hard way how to do so: have a kid.

I’m dead serious.

I mean, don’t have a kid if you don’t want one. Duh. But if you’re considering, have in mind that your productivity is about to go nuts.

I’ve done more in the 8 months of our baby’s existence than in my past 8 years. That might be an exaggeration. Or not.

I’m posting more than ever in my blog. I’ve read over 15 books since my kid was born, when I used to read one per quarter. I’m solo developing ZettelCastle. I’m writing a book.

And I still keep up with my mundane stuff: family, working out and working my 9-5.

I like my Hōjicha with oat milk, on ice. I buy it as powder, so to prepare it I use Japanese traditional tools. These include the bamboo whisk (or chasen) that sits on its holder (or kusenaoshi), a bowl to whisk (or chawan) and the bamboo spoon (or chashaku). I also use a strainer to break the powder evenly, so it mixes smoothly with the water.

Traditional tools

To prepare it I start by turning on my kettle to boil the water. I don’t have one of those fancy ones where you choose the temperature, so once it’s boiling I let it sit for a couple or three minutes, so it gets down to 70-80° degrees of temperature. It’s important to not get higher than 80° to prevent bitterness on the taste.

During those two to three minutes I set up the rest of the tools: I put the chasen in hot water in order to soften the bamboo fibers, this way they get more flexible and don’t snap while whisking later on. I prepare the strainer on top of the chawan, and I pour two spoons of hojicha powder in it with the chashaku.

The powder before smoothing through the strainer

I then start breaking the powder and any possible clumps by doing circular movements of pressure on top of the strainer, resulting in a smooth texture falling down to the chawan. I also prepare a glass with a couple of ice blocks and the oat milk.

At this point the water is already at the right temperature, so I pour the amount I desire into the chawan. I’m sure there’s the right amount of water to pour, but it’s unknown to me, I discovered the amount that sets the taste to my liking by trial and error. Once the water is poured I whisk it together with the powder, by moving the chasen in a vertical zig-zag manner for half a minute, always avoiding touching the bottom of the chawan so it aerates the tea and creates a nice creamy and smooth foam on top.

The creamy foam after whisking

Once done, it’s time to mix it with the oat milk already set up. I let it fall in a circular movement so it spreads evenly on the surface, and watch it drop and blend from the outside. There’s something so aesthetically pleasing in the way the hōjicha blends with the oat milk, it always makes me pause for a few seconds, almost as if the whole point of brewing the tea was to experience this moment rather than drinking it.

Hōjicha slowly blending with the oat milk

I could buy the hōjicha in teabags and just let it brew in hot oat milk. But I know I wouldn’t do that, I know the teabags would be sitting next to the other teas we have at home for years until they expired.

In my last post I mention how new tools are shaping our craft, or lack thereof due to the velocity such tools provide. In such a world I find myself accidentally finding craft in mundane everyday things, like making a glass of hōjicha latte. And I don’t think I’m alone with this.

I’ve noticed how more people are getting into specialty coffee brewing at home lately, and how Lego is making a come back. I’d argue this is not coincidence. In the fast paced world we live in, where everything strives to be as convenient as it can for us, where there’s more information and inputs that we can humanly handle, I think we, as humans, still crave the slowness of things.

Back in 1901, a clerk in his forties named Frank Hornby invented a toy. It was an assembling kit based on mechanical engineering principles that included stuff like perforated metal strips, bolts and screws. I was lucky enough to be born almost 90 years later, when this toy was already being sold in Barcelona toy stores under the name of Meccano.

I always preferred assembling Meccano cars and trucks—or building weird Duplo constructions—over playing with action figures. Or at least that’s what my parents always say. Truth be told, I don’t remember much about my happy post-toddler years. But their story fits perfectly with how I turned out, so I believe them.

I’ve always been curious about how things operate or are built. But even more so, I’ve been curious about building and making them work by myself. It won’t come as a surprise then, that it meant the world to me when I finally got my own personal computer with access to the internet. Back when no social media existed and people just gathered around forums.

I was around 12 or 13 when I stumbled upon a tool called RPG Maker 2003, it was a dream come true for any Final Fantasy nerd like I was at the time (still am). RPG Maker was my first contact with programming. I didn’t write a single line of code, but I started thinking in logical terms: fire this dialog when I step onto this tile; if the treasure chest is already open, display it as such and don’t allow looting it again.

I then pursued other interests during my teenage years—like writing, music, and playing World of Warcraft more than I should—until I found myself at uni, and programming came back into my life.

We had some C++ lectures, and they were the only ones where I received top marks. I remember having a blast writing long algorithms in pen and paper (yes, you read that right) in the exams. And so my builder spark was ignited again.

In 2012, my last year at uni, I was very lucky to find an internship gig at Codegram, a small Ruby on Rails shop. There I learned the foundations of my web development career, starting with the TDD methodology and what an MVC framework is.

I remember the excitement of learning how to assemble pieces of code to create applications. The dopamine rush of seeing the tests going green after the implementation and then checking the UI actually working. I was building again.

It’s 2026 now. I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years. I’ve been through a diverse number of companies and learned even more technologies. I’ve been the junior, the lead and the manager. I’ve shaped my opinions on what I consider the right and the wrong way to operate and get shit done.

And as much as things have been changing over the years, we’re living through the biggest shift I’ve experienced in my professional career.

Two years ago, software engineering was getting hands-on. We’d get a feature request and figure out how to solve it. We’d tinker, move code around, refactor and test. That was the fun part.

In 2026, I open Claude Code and describe a feature I want to build. It plans while I prompt another idea in parallel. And another. Then I review the first one and it starts implementing. Same for the rest. I ask for more changes and eventually merge.

It works.

I didn’t write any of it.

I’m not building anymore, I’m directing.

And I’m scared.

Not to lose my job. I’ve used these tools enough to understand how capable of producing a big pile of crap they are without the proper guidance. And someone still needs to have the ideas and prompt them. I’m scared of something else.

I’m scared of losing the joy of building stuff.

I’m scared of not being the kid who had fun building Meccanos anymore, but rather an observer of a tool that builds them for me.

Moving to a new home is exciting. It also sucks. Last year we decided to move to the city to be closer to our family, which meant a smaller place.

It’s hard to tell how much stuff you’ve hoarded over the years, until you realise you will have to fit it in half the space you used to have. Surprisingly, I didn’t ask myself “How are we even going to make room for this?” but rather “Why do I even have this?”. It almost felt like when you’re at the end of an RPG and realise you haven’t used a single consumable throughout, and you’re still keeping the rugged leather armor you started with.

We were halfway through February, and the moving company was coming the first week of March. And there I was, looking in disbelief at everything we had yet to pack.

There were clothes for when I get back in shape. Warhammer minis that have been plastic grey in a box for two decades. Philosophy books I’ve had for years and have never read. Enough cutlery to have 25 dinner guests and the spiral slicer to make zucchini spaghetti. There were even the couple of unused Raspberry Pi I got back in 2012, with some unopened components. And I could go on.

There was no way I was throwing away those—definitely not ready for battle—Space Marines. So we packed it all in boxes and for the next few days we pretended we weren’t living in a room made entirely of cardboard cubes, like some kind of low-budget Minecraft build.

The Minecraft phase

Fast forward a few weeks after the move, and we found ourselves living in a small flat, as cramped as it gets, that felt even smaller than it looked when we bought it. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling a bit snappy; tired of tripping on furniture, boxes and basically stuff that didn’t fit the new place.

Home is supposed to feel like your safe place, it’s supposed to feel calm and relaxing, and getting home from a short walk felt anything but calm. So I had to fix this somehow, and so I started selling stuff on secondhand platforms.

I saw secondhand selling not as a way to make money, but rather a way to let others buy me cheap square footage. Those clothes and books weren’t only worth 30% of their original value to buyers, but they were costing me 100% of the space they occupied. From this perspective, it was easy to let things go, and it helped me declutter pretty quickly.

The process of secondhand selling got messy fast. At some point my home office looked like a shipping company—full of boxes, shipping labels, and bubble wrap—and there were moments where I questioned whether it would be better to throw everything in the garbage container at once.

I was trying to be less stressed, but some days those trips to the post office, getting creative with packing and dealing with buyers only added to the chaos. I do believe though that it’s better to give stuff a second life—especially when most is in perfect condition—and I didn’t mind the couple extra bucks.

Somewhere around sale #195

It’s now been a few months, and after around 200 sales and countless trips to the post office, home is finally starting to feel like home again. As much as there’s still some more stuff I want to get rid of, I’ve already noticed a huge shift in my mental health.

Nowadays I don’t need a search-and-rescue mission to find a shirt. There are no Warhammer minis making my inner child feel guilty anymore. Our kitchen drawers now hold 4 pieces of cutlery each, instead of 20, and you can actually close them. We have half the furniture we used to have, and some of it we’ve changed for half its size. Our tables are now usable, instead of being storage space. It almost feels like we’ve moved to a more spacious place.

I don’t trip on furniture anymore. But most importantly, when I look at the stuff I have now I can ask myself “Why do I have this?” and actually provide an answer to the question. I either use it, love it, or it makes my life better.

Writing is cathartic for me. When I feel something I can’t quite understand, I pick up the pen and start dissecting myself on the paper. I just don’t usually do it in public.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about a video game before, but Outer Wilds left me feeling something I’m still struggling to comprehend. So this is me trying to make sense of it.

Spoiler warning: I’ll try to stay spoiler-free, but sensitive readers beware.

If I had to define my experience with this game in one word I’d probably say: weird. I experienced a lot of frustration during my playthrough, both in some game mechanics and, most importantly, in the fact that I wasn’t connecting with it the way I expected. Yet at the same time, I could appreciate many things in it.

I’d define Outer Wilds as a space archeology game, with a very original narrative, and an amazing soundtrack. A soundtrack that only plays in very few key moments—which feels fitting for the silent, lonely vastness of space. This morning, listening to it in my headphones, the soundtrack started shaping what I’m trying to put into words now.

The repeated melancholic motifs broke me.

Suddenly, all the reviews from other people—and how this game became a transcendent experience for them—started to resonate. But weirdly enough, I don’t think my case is exactly the same.

If I try to grasp what I’m feeling, it resembles loss, grief, mourning. Yet I felt like the game leaned more towards acceptance. Which is close, but not quite. Or maybe acceptance is exactly what I’m doing right now in writing this.

Outer Wilds cannot be replayed. Well, not in the way that it’s meant to be played at least. Once you’ve played it once, you must make peace with the fact that you will not be able to experience it again. The sense of wandering in ignorance is gone. Only an echo of what it’s been remains. An echo that I can now only relive through its soundtrack.

I didn’t enjoy Outer Wilds, but it moved me. And I’m realizing these contradictions can exist. Not everything that touches you needs to feel good.

It starts with an idea, which at first feels crystal clear. But once you sit down to write about it, you realize it’s just a mess of entangled and disorganized concepts in your head. Then you start writing to connect the pieces together and start revealing detail. This is actually happening in my head right now—while I’m writing this piece.

I have a close friend who never liked writing, yet somehow, one day he told us about the book he was about to get published. I couldn’t quite understand how he managed to achieve such feat, but I still admired him for it—publishing a book being one of the things I’d like to do before I die. Everything quickly clicked when he introduced us to the concept of ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting is the practice of writing for someone else who will then take credit for the piece as its author. If you do a quick search for books that have been ghostwritten, you’ll quickly understand how a lot of celebrities—that you’d never thought could be amazing writers—are actually selling best sellers with their name on the cover.

I don’t want to dive into the ethical side of it, but if you think about it, there’s a lot of people with deeply interesting things to say, that we probably wouldn’t read if they wrote it themselves. Also, I have nothing but respect for all those ghostwriters in the shadows. Ghostwriting used to be a luxury for the few, but in 2025—with the rise of AI tools—it’s been democratized for the masses.

Or so people think.

There’s a lot of people who are now throwing a vague idea—painting the canvas with only the thick strokes—and letting the AI define the details. As much as people believe they do, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini don’t think, they’re actually like the autocomplete on your phone, but on steroids. They are systems trained on humongous amounts of text that are capable of finding statistical relationships between words, structures or concepts. So no, AI is not ghostwriting for anyone, because at least with ghostwriters we had a soul behind the words.

When everyone starts vibe writing, all the content on the internet that we consume doesn’t sound, well, human. There’s some light nuances between how a human and an LLM actually write, but we humans are surprisingly good at spotting it. An LLM doesn’t actually reason to connect the dots, it connects them statistically, while in a human-written piece we can feel the struggle of reasoning through them.

It feels like the internet is slowly becoming a place where robots interact with each other and we humans have become distant spectators. We have more content than ever, but it’s as hollow as it gets. But I’m not trying to lecture anyone here.

It’s confession time.

Yes. I’m guilty of using such tools to write for me. Not anymore, though—believe it or not every em dash in this piece has been carefully curated by me.

No, I never did go as far as giving the AI a vague idea and let it unravel the rest for me—but I did provide an idea, bullet points, and some guidance on how to develop it. This was fun at the beginning, it made me feel productive, and every time I asked GPT to write something I’d get a dopamine rush—much like the one you’d get from a slot machine—in seeing the AI connect my dots in seconds. But much like a gambling addict, I soon started to realize the drawbacks of this.

The first thing I noticed is that it was harder to recall some of my so-called written words. Skipping the mental exercise of connecting all the dots myself made me look like I knew what I was talking about, but the harsh reality is that I wasn’t. Trying to explain it to someone else was as hard as writing the piece from scratch. Not only that, but when I read my words again I realized those words sounded nothing like me. It was essentially losing my voice.

I’ve been discussing writing like you would in blog posts, or journaling. But the reality is that I used these tools to write many more things. I started by writing that formal email I wasn’t sure how to polish, I followed with blog posts, LinkedIn posts, Slack messages… and one day, I ended up passing the GPT Filter™ before sending a Whatsapp message to a friend. True story, by the way.

When you adopt a tool in this manner, you’ve developed complete dependence, you’ve become an addict. It might not look like a big deal at first, but losing the ability to craft a simple message for a friend—having mental fogginess in such an arbitrary thing—looks quite like a big deal to me.

We’re talking about completely losing the ability to think, and to think critically. When we manually unfold the details on what we write there’s an internal conversation—going back and forth in our head—that makes us question our own thoughts, which is actually what helps finding that mental clarity, something that doesn’t happen when we delegate those skills to a program.

Like I said, I’ve recently started writing again. And at first the pain was very real. It was hard to connect the dots. Any time I couldn’t find the words, I had the urge to ask the AI assistant, and I realized how I became completely reliant on them. But I still forced myself to go on, and I’m glad I did. Not just because I noticed how I was slowly recovering my ability to put thoughts into words, but also because I got the joy of writing back. There’s something oddly satisfying in the state of flow you put yourself into while writing. It’s almost meditation.

I feel I can’t close this topic without mentioning a few ways to sensibly use these tools—at least, from my point of view. Instead of letting them do all the work for you I think sensible usages include things like grammatical or orthographic reviews, analyzing if the piece flows well together or even research on the topic you’re writing about. Like any tool out there, tools are meant to accelerate us, not replace us.

If you are a heavy user of vibe writing I hope this read gave you something to think about. As for myself, this piece might have its flaws—heck, it might even be garbage—but I enjoyed the hell out of writing it. I’m back to enjoying this craft, and I even picked up my fountain pen to journal on paper again. Fun times.

As one does, I turned some of those pauses into Existential Decluttering™ moments (or tidying up à la Marie Kondo if you will).

And amidst the tidying, I came across this DIY miniature ramen stall kit that I bought last year in Japan. One of those with super tiny pieces and unclear Japanese instructions.

I’m not making this up!

While building it, I stumbled upon a few thoughts that, of course, only the Japanese¹ would already have a name for.

Yutori (ゆとり)² or Slowing Down Against Productivity

Literally “spaciousness”, “leeway”, or “room”, the Japanese use this concept to express the philosophy of slowing down, avoiding constant busyness, and prioritizing mental and physical well-being over relentless productivity.³

When you build software for a living, your days are measured in velocity. Quarter objectives, sprints… call them whatever you want. They all want one thing: to be as productive as possible, to finish as soon as possible.

But you cannot rush assembling a miniature ramen stall kit, at least not more than your hand motor skills allow you to. Everything depends on how steady your hands are. There’s glue that needs to dry, paint that needs to settle, and did I mention instructions in Japanese? (which is not just about the language)

Glue doing it’s thing

Somewhere between the drying, the waiting, and scanning instructions with Google Translate, I remembered what it feels like to actually enjoy the craft. Not optimise it, not monetise it but just to enjoy it.

Nowadays, with the rise of AI tools, we don’t just rush the craft, sometimes we skip it entirely, outsourcing the joy of making to a machine. Let that sink in.

There’s a kind of quiet joy in slowness that we are forgetting more and more about in tech. When you stop measuring output, you start noticing texture. And somehow, counterintuitively, it makes you feel more productive and fulfilled.

Or maybe yutori isn’t about moving slowly at all, and it’s about having room inside yourself, even when things move fast.

Wabi-sabi (侘寂) or Finding Beauty in Imperfection

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic and philosophy that finds beauty in imperfections, impermanence, and incompleteness.⁴

You can’t cmd+z in life nor can you while assembling these kits. My hands can’t be as precise as my CSS when striving for pixel perfection.

But that’s a feature, not a bug (yes, in life too). Seeing the miniature stall finished, with all its imperfections, it looked different than the one in the packaging. I put the hanging lantern facing the wrong way, the bench cushions are way too big, the chopstick handler is all cracked because I used too much glue. It’s imperfectly perfect in its own way, unique in the world. It tells a story no other miniature ramen stall can tell.

These potato shaped ramen pot lids were meant to be circular

It’s honest. Authentic.

Have you noticed how everyone sounds exactly the same lately online? Everybody is using em dashes and sounding so… flawlessly boring. Hey, I use ChatGPT quite a lot too, and I’ve also been guilty to let it write more than I should. But lately I’m using it more… responsively (if that’s the word). To fact-check. To refine. But not to erase my voice.

The way I see it, in the AI era, our flaws will matter more than ever. They’ll keep us honest, authentic, human, in a world driven by LLMs.

Shokunin (職人) or Putting Care in the Craft

People often translate shokunin as “craftsman,” but it isn’t just about skill or a trade. It’s devotion, a mindset. Showing up with care, humility, and pride because doing something well is a way of honoring others, not just yourself.⁵

I’m not a woodworker in a Kyoto workshop. I just build web applications (and occasionally tiny ramen stalls).

I know, it’s just a miniature ramen stall.

But somewhere between the glue drying and me holding my breath to place a 3mm chopped piece of wood to assemble one of the windows, I started thinking about craft, and how I want to write software the same way.

Assembling the windows

Anyone can generate code that works nowadays. But not everyone can care about the details, the intent, the taste, or the responsibility of making something that reflects judgment and pride.

And I want to be proud of what I ship.

AI is just a tool. Craftsmen moved from manual saws to power tools, and now co-write code with models. That didn’t make carpenters care less about how they assemble their work, and we don’t stop caring about the code we ship.

Shokunin isn’t about typing every line yourself. It’s about how you show up to the work. The part you refuse to outsource because it matters to you.

And the discipline to keep improving even when no one sees it, or when the AI creates the illusion that you don’t need to.

AI is an accelerator, but it won’t replace the spirit.

Final Words

I’m far from becoming the next programmer-zen master (so far, I just have two bonsai and a tiny hand-assembled mini ramen stall in my living room) but I hope these reflections sparked something in you.

I know how the Real World™ works, and that things evolve, but I think keeping a bit of Yutori, Wabi-sabi, and Shokunin in how we build things would do us all a favor.

As the greatest sensei once said:

“First learn balance. Balance good, karate good. Everything good.” — Mr. Miyagi

We don’t keep it the miniature here, just wanted to show off one of the bonsai