I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friction.
good vs. bad friction
A major project of the Tech Industry – if not THE project – is to eliminate friction. At my company, we talk about it constantly. Will adding CAPTCHA here add too much friction? Is asking for a phone number too much friction, therefore reducing conversion?
I’m not going to be so monk-ish as to pretend that I’m categorically against reducing friction. But, when the metric is money and there’s incentive to optimize for it, we rarely ask when removing friction is a good thing.
Put another way, we rarely distinguish friction as obstacle from friction as medium. When is friction the thing keeping us from what we want? And when is it the very thing we’re looking for?
Anyone who climbs rocks (or plastic) knows that the joy is not “climbing a 5.12”, the joy is everything that brought you there: challenging what you thought you were capable of, overcoming fear, and picking yourself back up after failure.
Now, to the point of this post:
my job is boring now
In the last two years, building software has been transformed from a grand challenge into something so easy you can literally do it in your sleep.
Today, the first step to every problem or creative desire in software is to go to Claude Code and ask for what you want. For me, that makes the work mind-numbingly dull.
The simple explanation is just that there’e no longer any craft to learn.
…
This post is a work in progress. To be covered soon:
- Ideas from:
- Shop Class as Soulcraft (once I’m further into it)
- Illich
- Bauldrillard
- Simone Weil on attention
- Thoughts on:
- Difficult inflation. Being able to do 20x more hard things at work makes doing once-easy things outside work harder
- Maybe the joy was never coding at all – it was just learning.
- other stuff