alt Hacker NewsI am one of those junior software developers who always struggled with starting their own projects. Long story short, I realized that my struggle stems from my lack of training in open-ended problems, where there are many ways to go about solving something, and while some ways are better than others, there's no clear cut answer because the tradeoffs may not be relevant with the end goal.
I realized that when a friend of mine gave me Factorio as a gift last Christmas, and I found myself facing the exact same resistance I'm facing while thinking about working on my personal projects. To be more specific, it's a fear and urge of closing the game and leaving it "for later" the moment I discover that I've either done something wrong or that new requirements have been added that will force me to change the way my factories connect with each other (or even their placement). Example: Tutorial 4 has the players introduced to research and labs, and this feeling appears when I realize that green science requires me to introduce all sorts of spaghetti just to create the mats needed for green science!
So I've done what any AI user would do and opted to use chatGPT to push through the parts where things are either overwhelming, uncertain, too open-ended, or everything in between. The result works, because the LLM has been trained to Factorio guides, and goes as far as suggesting layouts to save myself some headache!
Awesome, no? Except all I've done is outsource the decision of how to go about "the thing" to someone else. And while true, I could've done this even before LLM's by simply watching a youtube video guide, the LLM help doesn't stop there: It can alleviate my indecisiveness and frustration with dealing with open-ended problems for personal projects, can recommend me project structure, can generate a bullet pointed lists to pretend that I work for a company where someone else creates the spec and I just follow it step by step like a good junior software engineer would do.
And yet all I did just postponed the inevitable exercise of a very useful mental habit: To navigate uncertainty, pause and reflect, plan, evaluate a trade-off or 2 here and there. And while there are other places and situations where I can exercise that behavior, the fact remains that my specific use of LLM removed that weight off my shoulders. I became objectively someone who builds his project ideas and makes progress in his Factorio playthrough, but the trade-off is I remain the same person who will duck and run the moment resistance happens, and succumb to the urge of either pushing "the thing" for tomorrow or ask chatGPT for help.
I cannot imagine how someone would claim that removing an exercise from my daily gym visit will not result in weaker muscles. There are so many hidden assumptions in such statements, and an excessive focus of results in "the new era where you should start now or be left behind" where nobody's thinking how this affects the person and how they ultimately function in their daily lives across multiple contexts. It's all about output, output, output.
How far are we from the day where people will say "well, you certainly don't need to plan a project, a factory layout, or even decide, just have chatGPT summarize the trade-offs, read the bullet points, and choose". We're off-loading portion of the research AND portion of the execution, thinking we'll surely be activating the neurosynapses in our brains that retains habits, just like someone who lifts 50% lighter weights at the gym will expect to maintain muscle mass or burn fat.
This is just the kind of thing that Dr David Burns' work on TEAM-CBT therapy deals with.
> "Long story short, I realized that my struggle stems from my lack of training"
you say, and then you explain exactly where your struggle is, and it's not lack of training:
> "it's a fear and urge of closing the game and leaving it "for later" the moment I discover that I've either done something wrong"
There you are. It's that fear. Fear comes from your brain modeling the world and predicting the future, and predicting a bad future and generating fear (or anxiety, or other bad feelings) to change your behaviour and avoid that future. So find why "doing something wrong" is making you predict a bad future, what bad future, and then find a way to fix that where you can be wrong but it isn't the end of your world, and then this fear and urge won't appear anymore.
1) one of those things like "finding out I've done something wrong" happens, or you imagine it happening.
2) you imagine some kind of negative future event that follows on from doing something wrong, this is a habit of thinking that you learned so it might be fast, almost sub-conscious, flicker of ideas and thoughts.
3) from those, your brain generates bad feelings (feelings are a high level sweeping way to change our behaviour without thinking about tons of details).
4) you get the urge to push it away and close the game, so you can avoid those future events happening, so that can save you from future badness, bad feelings calm down (but different ones may appear like guilt, shame, inadequacy, etc).
5) you don't consciously notice this happening, so you make up some other reason that sounds nice and plausible and doesn't involve changing anything ("lack of training").
6) repeat this mental habit for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.
> "postponed the inevitable exercise of a very useful mental habit: To navigate uncertainty, pause and reflect, plan, evaluate a trade-off or 2 here and there."
That's not where your problem is, you aren't lacking the ability to evaluate a trade-off, you're lacking the ability to go wrong. Being able to evaluate any situation so you never ever go wrong isn't possible, that can't be the answer. The only answer can be from becoming okay with going wrong [I hope you will feel an automatic rejection here, how can it possibly be OK to be wrong and screw something up? I don't want to be OK with going wrong! See?].
Step one of a fix is to focus your attention on "it's a fear and urge of closing the game and leaving it "for later" the moment I discover that I've either done something wrong" and push into that. Remember or find a specific example of that which makes the feeling come up - what task were going wrong brings up that feeling - write it down.
Step two, look at your thoughts at that moment, what are you telling yourself will happen next that is so automatic and habitual and reflex and fast that you can barely notice it happening, but is basically the horrible future you're always worrying about? [If it helps, imagine a cartoon character who is just like you, in that "oh no I screwed up" situation with a thought bubble above their head, and write in what they are thinking which is oh so very relatable to you].
It will be some typical human thing like "it will prove I'm not smart and my fiance or parents won't love me" or "I will become unemployed and homeless and get sick on the streets and die" or "it will prove my lifelong fear that I don't deserve respect and am inferior to everyone else" but the details will be unique to you and what you fear and worry about.
And the next Dr Burns specific step is that you need to see why you are holding onto that pattern of thought, it's not just stopping you from making progress in projects, it's got some silver lining that is protecting and upholding some other ideals you value, and you don't want to let this pattern change and let go of the fear if it means losing something else equally or more valuable (e.g. "if I don't fear becoming homeless then I won't push myself to work harder and will waste my life as a drifter", or what I said earlier "I don't want to be okay with going wrong, people who screw things up and don't care are LOSERS who make everything worse!", again, the details will be specific to you).
And then to do some therapy techniques to work out how to unpick all this, and change it, in a way that keeps the ideals you want, and releases the sticking points you don't want.
> "I cannot imagine how someone would claim that removing an exercise from my daily gym visit will not result in weaker muscles."
If you do weighted abs exercises first, then you can't do good squats because your abs hurt, removing the abs work might be an overall gain. If you do too much everyday so you can't recover properly in one night of rest, removing some more intense work might be an overall gain. If you try to do too many exercises in a rush so you can't do a good job on any of them, removing one so you can do fewer, better quality, might be an overall gain. If you hate one exercise and it puts you in a bad mood and every month or two you get a minor injury from it that knocks your progress back, removing it might be a mood boost and an overall gain. If you remove a small targetted exercise and replace it with a larger compound exercise, it might be an overall gain.