Learning

The Christmas break gave me something I rarely get during the year: time to learn without urgency. Two threads of exploration converged in interesting ways - one practical, one theoretical, both about AI’s role in how we work. Hands-On: Claude Code I spent part of the break experimenting with Claude Code, finally putting it through its paces on a problem that had defeated me for years: refactoring my Emacs configuration. Seven minutes of AI-assisted work accomplished what months of Sunday afternoons couldn’t....

I’ve had to declare “configuration bankruptcy” a few times now,1 each time promising myself this would be the clean, well-organized config I’d maintain going forward. And each time, within months, my init.el would devolve into a sprawling maze of half-commented code blocks and sections titled things like “Misc” and “TODO: organize this.” In 2022, I made a serious attempt to fix this. Sunday afternoons at a local coffee shop became my ritual - laptop open, config file sprawled across my screen, the goal clear: create a well-documented, properly organized init....