Saying no

Shiny objects are closer than they appear

These days it’s easy to say yes to things. If I come up against some friction, or someone has a bright idea in Slack, or I see room for architectural improvement, I can spin up an agent and start exploring. Sometimes I’ll have a solution in minutes. Sometimes I’ll have another unrelated idea mid-implementation and spin up a second agent to explore that idea. I’m not the “distracted by shiny objects” type in general, but in this early stage of agentic-powered engineering it’s a trap I keep falling into.

Today I found myself feeling mentally overwhelmed, demotivated, and not entirely happy that any of the things I’m working on were impactful enough. I decided to slow down and try to be more intentional about where I’m putting my time. A dozen bookmarked conversations in Slack, calendar full of meetings, 20 unfinished local git branches, and a few engineering initiatives floating around in my head. At the beginning of the month I’d set an intention to be more involved in product engineering, but none of these things were directly product related. They’re all tangential process or platform improvements which don’t impact our users or contribute to revenue. These things are important of course, but this grey zone is where busywork happens and leads to an invisible career - valuable, but lived behind-the-scenes without much to show for it.

To free myself of this prison of my own making, I realised I need to start saying no to more things, specifically:

Software engineering is full of rabbit holes and opportunities to get nerd-sniped by interesting things. By saying no to more things I hope to be a better engineer.