thinking slow, writing fast

I noticed a strange phenomenon after I had kids, something that continues to yield positive results. There are huge parts of the day where I don't have access to a computer or unlimited time to write code. During those moments, when I'm preoccupied with the kids or life, I catch myself spending more time thinking about problems and how to solve them. Within this limitation, I find that I'm spending more time thinking about code and less time writing it.

As a result, my coding time is more deliberate. I can spend more time researching, thinking about api design, and how I plan to organize the code. This has been a fantastic boost to my productivity, which feels almost counter-intuitive: why am I more productive when writing less? I think this plays well into the growing adoption of code agents that our role as a swe is not purely about writing code; some of us just really enjoy that part.

This translates into another realization as I advance in my career: I'm spending more of my day validating code works as expected. To me, it's clear that my role as a staff swe is quality control. As I talk to friends about my code review workflow, they all seem so surprised that every PR I review is pulled down and read in my editor. It doesn't matter how well the git diff webview is designed, it'll never replace my editor and since I need to qa during code review, there's no reason to skip this part of the process. And guess what? I almost always find something that I would have otherwise missed, sometimes major bugs in impl.

This leads into another idea that has always been important but is growing in necessity: you can't trust any code contribution. The reality is people often don't run main and when they do they get stuck in their own validation loop that can miss important use cases. This is simply a fundamental reality, it doesn't matter what pr template checklist you add, people can be npcs and are literally npcs when code agents are involved.

Now that I've adjusted to thinking slow and writing fast, I'm enjoying it. Before bed, instead of cranking through code that is not well formed in my head, I'll do something else. Instead I get into bed, turn the lights off, put my blindfold on, listen to music, and just think about code. I'll spend hours in the dark just thinking slow.