In The Dark Knight Rises, we see a retired Bruce Wayne coaxed into “taking a look” at Lucius Fox’s latest creation: a flying version of the Batmobile he calls “The Bat”. Lucius finishes off his introduction telling Bruce the following:

A better mind

Bruce is surprised at Lucius’s obvious lie, an attempt at modesty. After all, Lucius was the one who built all of the Batman’s gadgets and the face of Wayne Enterprises.

A less busy mind

I’ve not been able to stop thinking about this scene for the past few weeks. I have had a lot of personal projects that I’ve never completed, and this has been a hard thing on my mind. Was I getting older? Did I lose interest in these projects? Am I not as creative as I used to be?

These sort of thoughts kept pushing me towards burnout, and I didn’t realize what it was doing until after I took a well deserved break to focus on my health.

I started using Claude Code a while ago, dabbling in using it to build several things that I would have otherwise not been able to do.

Just to list things off:

  1. A centralized place to store all my scripts
  2. A version of rustlings but for Go
  3. A website through which to read the RFCs that built the Internet
  4. A self-hosted solution to remember medicine schedules for anyone in the family - human or pets

And, I haven’t written about this yet, but I also managed to migrate all the old posts from my Jekyll and Sphinx-based blogs into Hugo with little effort!

Doing this has been making me feel productive again, even though I’m not directly writing code these days. Instead, it’s helping me focus on doing things for myself, bring into fruition ideas that have never dared voice themselves.

I’ve read a lot about how LLMs and Coding Agents can take away jobs, and it surely does feel that way, because as of this post, I’m still looking for a job.

However, it is also true that these tools are enabling. They allow you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise try to.

Case in point: I managed to “fix” the touchpad on my laptop. I am able to pinch to zoom, use three finger swipe to go forward and back in webpages, and I’m able to use all the multimedia keys on my keyboards with ease.

Did I mention that I’m running Linux?

And, my laptop now supports native screen rotation. The Asus X13 Flow has an accelerometer that never worked well on Linux, at least not in a tiling window manager and now, it works with ease! I am also able to extend my Rofi config to have scripts for things I didn’t ever think I’d get around to, like being able to copy my dunst notifications to memory.

And, most importantly, I’m able to fix problems in my neovim config without bothering to dig into the minutae of the plugins I use.

I was thinking about this even when using some devices and services I didn’t have any hand in building. Like my Shokz OpenSwim Pro 2 bone conduction headphones for example. These are the headphones I use during swimming, and I used Claude to whip up some scripts to rip my audiobooks from Audible and split them into 5 minute mp3 segments for use in the pool. This is very specific usecase, but Shokz comes with an app that allows you to tweak settings on the headphones. You can also skip ahead or go back in the track list, which is useful since the device is like the iPod Shuffle, you can’t see what track you’re on, which is a bummer when you’re listening to an audiobook. The app allows you to skip ahead and back, but it doesn’t show the name of the file that’s currently playing. It’s not that this isn’t possible. It definitely is. But the developers making this app didn’t have the time or the energy to code this feature. As I was listening to something, I realized that with a coding agent, they could have gotten around to this after all. It would have made the experience perfect.

I can’t remember the list of services that would have gotten better if the developers got more time or were better staffed. It’s funny saying this as the entire industry is facing the biggest job crisis in its history, but it is true. I faced it myself, honestly. I was too busy to get some things done and I didn’t have any help. I only blamed myself, telling myself that I was too slow. The sentiment seemed to be echoed at some of the companies I’ve worked at. This only pushed me towards burnout, but it is really hopeful to see what potential a coding agent can have in the right hands.

I’ve talked about burnout with some friends, but I’ve never publically written about it before. I thought perhaps I lost my love for programming. Turns out I just needed a less busy mind to learn to love building things again.