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Stepping Back

On Stepping Back The other day I was playing around with Claude Code, experimenting with porting some C code to Rust - not for any particular reason, just because I was curious how well it could do. As these things happen, I got more and more invested in the process, instead of just letting Claude do something and noting what happened, I kept poking in and adjusting the behavior, "no you can't pretend the result is 0, try again" - the usual stuff when you're trying to get an LLM to do something large or novel.

Sometimes the breaks are imposed: my wife and I are off to get lunch, and while walking to the door I realize the last 2 hours spent feverishly trying to get some RPC from A to B to work are actually pointless and there's some much simpler solution. At least I can't seem to hold both of them in my head at the same time: if you're trying to debug some subtle problem involving 10 layers of software and hardware, you can't afford the brain space for questioning whether you'd be better off trying a different approach. I find if I align it to natural time boundaries: hours, days, weeks, months, years, I can sort of set a mental schedule for myself and it's not too much of a distraction.

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