Last week I released Protocollie. Built in 4 days with languages I don’t know, without even directly touching the code. People keep asking “how?” but I’m not entirely sure it’ll work the same way twice.
We’re all making this up as we go.
The Great Experiment Nobody's Running the Same Way
There's this moment in every new technology where everyone pretends they know what they're doing. We're past that moment. Or maybe we haven't reached it yet. Either way, we're in this delicious middle ground where nobody can pretend expertise because the whole thing keeps changing under our feet.
I've been thinking about expertise lately. How long does it take to become an expert? Malcolm Gladwell said 10,000 hours, but he was talking about violins and chess. Skills where the rules don't update every two weeks. Where your muscle memory doesn't become obsolete overnight.
If the most experienced AI pair programmer in the world has been doing this for at most two years then we're all beginners. Forever beginners, probably, the way things are accelerating.
My Current Experiment (Subject to Change)
I keep calling it a "system" but that implies I planned it. What really happened was more like accumulation. Like how a desk collects papers until suddenly you have a "filing system."
It started with one document because I kept forgetting what I told Claude about the architecture. Then two documents because I got tired of solving the same problems. Then three because I noticed I was repeating the workflow. Then four because the stories needed somewhere to live.
Four documents. Not because four is optimal. Just because that's when I stopped adding more.
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