What the author is describing isn’t my experience at all. I tend to operate from a lens of asking for increased feedback as my work takes me further off the “beaten path”. There’s essentially zero chance I’m going to go off screwing around porting code with an LLM unless I already bounced the idea of doing that off of another person or two that I trust.
In my hobbies I think going off on tangents _is_ the experience, so I have no qualms about doing it. But when I’m working I’m almost always thinking in terms of stewardship. Is what I’m doing good for the business, our customers, my coworkers, my own professional development, etc.? Any sort of fixation on minutiae is just subservient to those questions.
That said, I don’t think of a 5 minute tangent like the author describes as a heavy investment. If anything it’s just a happy little side-journey taken to better understand the nature of the problem space. For me the threshold of “this may be a waste of time” is more measured in hours than minutes.
In my hobbies I think going off on tangents _is_ the experience, so I have no qualms about doing it. But when I’m working I’m almost always thinking in terms of stewardship. Is what I’m doing good for the business, our customers, my coworkers, my own professional development, etc.? Any sort of fixation on minutiae is just subservient to those questions.
That said, I don’t think of a 5 minute tangent like the author describes as a heavy investment. If anything it’s just a happy little side-journey taken to better understand the nature of the problem space. For me the threshold of “this may be a waste of time” is more measured in hours than minutes.