Side Projects Everywhere. Oh my!
The Times They Are A-Changin’
When I first started testing AI interfaces, one of the first things I did was audit my old code — Ruby bits and Python 2 utilities I’d built over the years for work. I migrated everything to Python 3, and the result was fantastic.
What I didn’t want was a workflow where progress depends on a browser tab: copy, paste, run, fix, repeat. So I kept working the way I always had, but with AI alongside me during design. The real shift came when I stopped treating prompts as “requests” and started treating them as constraints. Simple rules made outputs more reliable: specify inputs and outputs, forbid invented details, require explicit assumptions, and force a short verification checklist before any conclusion.
Then agents arrived. Two or three half-finished personal projects became ten, or more — also half-finished. Lowering the cost of starting work doesn’t lower the cost of finishing it; it multiplies the number of open loops.
So this is the phase I’m in now: sit down, think, prioritize, and enforce a gate. One rule, written like a prompt to myself: “Don’t start anything new unless you finish — or deliberately discard — what came before.” Let’s see how long it lasts.