It can't even _____

I just had two really different feelings at the same time.

I am working on a web app, and I’d say I’m doing quite a bit to make the whole app and team function. I’m committing tons of code, experimenting with different uses of AI, I’m doing planning with the product team, I’m meeting with managers, trying to distill information and pass down edicts to them with the necessary touch of personal opinion that makes sure that the company values are utmost, protected information remains so, and giving them motivation to do the tasks that they need to do, I’m 1:1ing with every member of my team once per month, I’m befriending developers, I’m trying to incite culture, I’m trying to build a professional, exciting, and value, priority aligned team, I’m planning onsites, I’m interviewing candidates, I’m debating new features, I’m listening to feedback, I’m defining security posture, I’m making infrastructure, shit, above everything:

I AM TRYING, DAMNIT

I am listening to emo, I am raising my kids, I am trying to listen more than I speak, I am reading what I hope others think are interesting books, I am working out, I am taking supplements, I make sure my wife and I have deep conversations and moments, I am questioning my agnosticism because my son believes in God, and I am trying to understand that, I am listening to history books, I am listening to podcasts that my boss recommends, I am networking, I am trying to be a good mentee and follower.

So tonight, I was doing something I (think is|thought was) really cool - I have created a ‘meta repository’ for our coding repository, and it works something like this:

• You open opencode in the main area:
• It has explicit instructions to delegate work to workers
• It has a few scripts to reset/spin up/tear down workers
• the workers are delegated to by the main opencode issuing tasks to the child repositories by calling opencode over the cli (this spawns the worker process which itself will probably use subagents to explore and accomplish tasks)

(if this is all sounding a bit familiar, yes it’s based on that gastown thing)

Okay now that you know what I’m working with there, over in my main repo (like main working area, where I check out and manually verify work + write a little code to make myself happy) - I instruct opencode to become a pentester, and write a suite of tests against this repo and investigate for security issues. It was only instructed to write the tests and collect it’s findings in a document.

Then, I told it to make an epic from the document, and a child task for all of the 27 findings in the doc. THEN make a plan for implementation on each of the children

(maybe you see where I’m going with this)

Then, back in the meta repo, I tell it to batch the stories from the epic, and do work against each ticket in parallel (in batches of 5 because that seems to be what my system is capable of handling) and track all of it’s work on Jira by commenting each workers status, love it!

Then I get this Slack ping about a bug in the app

user says “I can’t even ____”

where ____ is anything, really - it’s the word “even” that bothers me here, it’s as though they’re intentionally insulting the application. I bought a juicer, and it can’t even juice! It’s a dog whistle that screams “I FIND YOUR PRODUCT TO BE LOW QUALITY”.

If they’d said “I can’t ____” whoa, we’re in a whole new realm, this is polite, informative, succinct, I like this person. It’s wild that that one word can deflate me so much.

I felt this way when I did architectural renderings too, in those cases - I was putting my art on display, and seeing if they liked it. Often people would give pretty blunt and brutal reviews of my work “it looks too cartoony” and often “make it more real”

In both cases, where my feelings were hurt, the person is right - they’re just an asshole. I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t get defensive of your product if they’re the ones paying the bill - in North American culture, the customer is trained to think they’re right, and maybe this is why they’d add that adjective that implies that we’re so far below their expectations that we can’t even ____.

But I refuse to give in? No! Of course I’ll fix the damn bug, and I’ll keep quiet but I’ll have my ultimate vengeance I’ll get ’em where it counts, I’ll make something so compelling they’ll overlook the warts, then they’ll change their tune - “It would be great if ____”, and “could we please have ____”, oh that’ll be so sweet when that happens.

Like I tell my son - if you want to truly get to someone, do it on the scoreboard (he’s super into soccer, I never was, but I’m supporting his passions) but this is a fight with my internal need for petty-ness, but I’m an adult, and but, but, but it’s just not worth my time to obsess over this, we’ve got cool shit to get back to.

So here I am - triumphantly maxing out my token usage, listening to Johnny Foreigner on repeat, quelling my pettiness, blogging, and trying to understand my feelings.