alt Hacker NewsI've recently lazied out big time on a company project going down a similar rabbit hole. After having a burnout episode and dealing with sole caregiver woes in the family for the past year, I've had less and less energy to piece together intense, correct thought sequences at work.
As such I've taken to delegating substantial parts architecture and discovery to multiagent workflows that always refer back to a wiki-like castle of markdown files that I've built over time with them, fronted by Obsidian so I can peep efficiently often enough.
Now I'm certainly doing something wrong, but the gaps are just too many to count. If anything, this creates a weird new type of tech debt. Almost like a persistent brain gap. I miss thinking harder and I think it would get me out of this one for sure. But the wiki workflow is just too addictive to stop.
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You’re not doing anything wrong. This isn’t a bulletproof idea. It can work, and this is what a lot of people end up with to manage complexity, but there’s a critical point beyond which things collapse: the agent can’t keep the wiki up to date anymore, the developer can’t grok it anymore.
That has been my experience as well. Most of the value of writing docs or a wiki is not in the final artifacts, it's that the process of writing docs updates your own mental models and knowledge so that you can make better decisions down the road.
Even if you can get an LLM to output good artifacts that don't eventually evolve into slop, which is questionable, it's really not that useful, especially not for a personal wiki.
Just w.r.t having time to think harder, have you considered getting a hobby that forces you to go offline and do something repetitive so your mind can wander? I do this with walks (phone left at home) and sometimes swimming laps. Physical exercise may not seem appealing if you're in burnout territory, but I think it's worth trying because for me at least it's a different, mostly orthogonal, kind of fatigue.
> I miss thinking harder
Me too, and I wonder where this will take us; I worry about losing the ability to think hard.