Deliberately

We took the train from Morioka to Kitakami earlier today. Not some fancy Shinkansen: just a two-car regional train.¹

This allowed me to stand basically in the driver's cab the entire way, which of course I did. I'd heard about the Japanese 'pointing and calling' behaviour but never seen it myself. The idea is that before every action, they point at the thing they're about to do, say it out loud, then do it. This reduces mistakes.

Here's a video that I took, which iCloud tells me will work until the end of November. (If that no longer works, just see the previous YouTube link.)

Doors locked. [00:27, points at orange light in the console.] Scheduled departure time. [Points at iPad, just out of frame on the right, then at his timepiece, center.] Other things checked. [Some more pointing.] And off we go.

They do this pulling out of every station. Very deliberate, every time.

Coding by pencil

Over the last week or so I've had Claude Code knock me up a proof of concept for the LLM-based file categorisation thing I'm working on. Then, as usual, I realised that I had no idea how this thing that I 'vibe coded' worked, so I'm starting again.

(I don't consider this a waste of time. A 'proof of concept' is just that. It did its job.)

I started with a pencil and my notepad. I'm writing down what I want this thing to do. In what stages? Using what commands? I can already feel the difference: rather than just sitting down and bashing the keyboard, it feels like I'm pausing; pointing at the thing; saying it out loud.

Doing it deliberately.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.