Ben Carlsson

i’m not there yet but i’m getting closer

i don’t want to become good at dismissing the same notification

good system design can prevent a thousand papercuts. but the cost of fixing papercuts is going to zero, so the incentive for good design is too. the papercuts still cause user grief. are we missing an incentive to prevent them? or is this the new way

a coding agent has no facial expression, so i have to infer “this repository is unusual” from the commands it runs

the file picker opened in a directory from a different chapter of my life

tabs versus spaces has a surprise third candidate: whatever this paste just did

what do you routinely copy out of an agent conversation because you don’t trust yourself to find it again?

there’s a point in debugging where i stop reading the code and start reading the code suspiciously

the compiler is very good at finding the second problem in my code

a scroll position is a bookmark i made without asking for a bookmark

i’m happy to learn a shortcut. i’m less happy to discover i’ve been activating it accidentally

what’s a piece of software you forgive a lot because one interaction feels exactly right?

assigning an agent a task has made me appreciate how much context i normally communicate by pointing at a screen and saying “that”

the fastest way to learn which parts of your app are hardcoded is to make the window smaller

terminal colors are fun because your carefully chosen gray might be someone else’s carefully chosen background

every settings page contains at least one checkbox whose consequences can only be learned experimentally

what’s the smallest piece of evidence that makes you go “okay, the agent actually checked”?

a good default is a decision i never have to learn was available

i want the program to remember my preferences with the persistence it currently reserves for remembering the wrong window size

a coding agent reading the readme before doing anything is setting an uncomfortable precedent for the rest of us

a keyboard shortcut is not intuitive just because the letters are somewhere in the name of the feature