second brain slop is dumb

Waylon Walker Author

Aug 22, 2026 1 min read

The second brain hype train of people looking at fancy graphs in obsidian of the content their clanker wrote for them is top tier cringe. If you actually want to get better at anything you need to actually put some effort in with your first brain.

Latest Thoughts #

Stop Making TUIs

simonwillison.net

Hard to argue this so hard here. For me it’s convenience. I work from a terminal most things that are real work get done there so this provide a convenient proximity to real work. If it’s a developer tool for me to use alongside development work I prefer a tui if it can be done in a text interface.

Clis are different. Clis provide a great interface into automation, scripting, agent use, interop from two things no one else uses together.

Alternatively to the argument for agents making real user interfaces easy I’m going to argue if that’s the case you should have your backend logic hooked into all the interfaces a user could want, CLI, tui, html, rest/http api.

I honestly feel like the training data for a good tui just isn’t there and agents default to making bad this.

I’m done with terminals

youtube.com

Hard agree with Theo, terminals suck to use on a phone. Unless you have an attached keyboard they are unusable IMHO.

t3 code ad

https://youtu.be/dLhcLqoff6k?t=1354&is=xDCw0PpqH2zkZDou [1]

This part of the pitch is fantastic. I think most of the people I talk to can relate to being unsure about when to start work because you want to keep your agents working.

My morning process generally includes walking around tmux greeting all of my agents that were working hard last night and unblocking them to get them going for the day. Before even opening team chat, but after checking status pages that #1.

My going home routine now has to start about an hour before I leave questioning whether I should start a session or not.

References: [1]: https://youtu.be/dLhcLqoff6k?t=1354&amp;is=xDCw0PpqH2zkZDou

This DIY Datacenter is NUTS

I have so much more appreciation for hetzner after seeing how the sausage is made. Their drive for efficiency is unparalleled. Not top tier performance, straight up well done engineering on the things that matter. No showing off or fancy stuff. The way they rack up their machines on a piece of sheet metal, that linus akinned to a desktop pc case without the front and side panels was chefs kiss.

DHH: How to Build a Profitable Company Without Losing Control

youtube.com

DHH is such an OG tech founder, I don’t think I realized his first paychecks from 37Signals was in the form of apple tech. What a shift to being such an apple fanboy to rage quitting and building a great linux distro that is siphoning his followers out of Mac.

I love the reminder of Gary V’s Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Meaning that you should build a following first, give, give, teach, show you have value then ask for something. The host mentioned one day they were frustrated with something, his co-founder suggested basecamp, and his response was buy it. Not shop around, see if theres something better, just buy it. He said these are my people, they’ve already given so much that I have no questions to whether or not we should give them money.

Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors

youtube.com

As always with Charity Majors this was a pretty great interview. Lots of repeat ideas with some good nuggets.

One common new theme here is getting comfortable shipping code you have never seen before. Pointing out there are few real differences in the before and the now, a lot of the same priciple apply to get the right #obervability stack setup, the right deployment patterns setup. Now we don’t have a person that immediately jumps up and yell’s I wrote that, Sorry everyone, and has a fix in 2 minutes because they know the exact failure mode they caused in an instant.

Charity truely believes the kids will be alright. She is working with some high school aged kids making some incredible projects right now. The industry will need to learn how to re-embrace juniors and the non grey-beards.

Why I’m sharing this link.

Recent Pings #

second brain slop is dumb #

agentic engineering takes discipline #

Agents allow so much scope creep it is harder to say no than it is to say yes, and let the model just pop in a new feature for you alongside you current pr with almost no effort on your befalf, staking up so much validation work for you to do that it becomes very difficult to merge. We are all learning this discipline right now.

Dammit I think I made an editor #

What started as a Joke, a test to gippity, has turned into personal software that I now depend on. Now from anywhere I can make a post to my website in just a few keystrokes. I can put it in the feed I want, encrypt it if I want, and it's live in like 12s.

Microsoft can only 50k #

Microsoft can only build software that takes 50,000 people.

No one wants to on call vibes #

No one wants to be on call for ai/agentic/vibes.

At the same time no one wants to give it up

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