Making the Cate Hall Machine
Here's #45 from Cate Hall's "50 things I know" list:
If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
Sounds like a good idea! But: isn't this the kind of task computers are good at? And am I not a professional do-things-with-computers person? As the excellent Cate Hall would say: You can just do things. Making an app to do this is something I can Just Do. So I did it.
Step 1: With 90 seconds left to go on my commuter rail ride, describe the app to Claude and ask it to make it for me. The app sends me a notification, once every 100 minutes on average (but at random, Poisson-distributed, during my waking hours), whether I could be doing better what I'm currently doing.
Step 2: Let Claude make the app while I walk from the train station home.
Step 3: In a spare 5-minute interval before dinner, review the code and install it on my phone.
Step 4: Take a couple more minutes to add a feature I want, along with some observability.
This took less than 10 minutes of active time and less than 15 minutes of wall-clock time. It is now running on my phone. You can just do things!