Managing a house with five kids can be challenging so I like to share what’s working for us when I can. This post is how we currently handle screen time. Screens can be addictive, and it’s easy for anyone (both kids and adults) to fall into unhealthy patterns using them. Historically, I’ve been uncomfortable with screen time restrictions because I don’t want to restrict all the useful, creative, and productive opportunities that screens can provide. We’ve tried zero restrictions in the past (alongside Daily Demos as a creativity incentive), which worked ok, but at some point we wanted bit more structure. Here’s what that structure currently looks like. Device use categories For family members without phones, we have carved out the following categories of time: “Free Time” - Kids are free to do whatever activities they want (bounded only by what we’ve made available for them at the house). Video games, movies, board games, homework, run around outside, whatever. Often, this time trends towards consumption on devices, but it doesn’t have to. We call it “free time” instead of “screen time,” because we want to emphasize that the opportunities are wider than just screens. “Project Time” - Kids are encouraged to do projects, which are usually defined as creative activities of all kinds (with or without screens). This category can be blurry so we’ve often put together lists of approved project time activities, including things like: arts and crafts, coding (including “Scratch create”), playing musical instruments, recording videos, Minecraft (creative mode), the Powder Toy, Dojo Islands, and anything on Let’s Get Creative. Device-based consumption is not allowed. Offline activities are usually considered fine (reading a book, doing a puzzle, etc). “No devices” - No device use allowed. Addendum: Grant Proposals If a kid wants a one-time exception to one of the categories above, we tell them to “submit a grant proposal.” This means they need to get some paper, and write out what they want to do, and why they think it is justified. Example 1: “I want to play Minecraft creative after dinner because I am building a full-scale piano, I want to demo it tonight, and I only have 10 more minutes of work until it’s done.” Example 2: “I want to play Terraria during project time because I am making an tutorial on how to beat Moon Lord, and I need to collect screenshots from the game for my tutorial.” We usually approve grant proposals, as long as they aren’t incomplete. Schedule With these categories defined, we just need to decide how much time to allocate, and when to schedule it. For example, here’s our current “no devices” schedule: "No Devices" times Reason After Dinner Reduce stimulation before bed Sundays Protected for church and family Saturdays, before chores are done Incentivize quick completion of chores, so our Saturday afternoons remain available The categories + schedule constitutes our device policy, in addition to Daily Demos, which we continue to hold on the side. Summary Addictive device consumption can easily crowd out activities that are important long-term but deliver less dopamine short-term. Our device-time categories create a protected space for those activities on a consistent schedule that our kids can expect and make plans around. This is what works for us. Your milage may vary! Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to some sort of in-group (be it pro-AI, anti-AI, etc). I couldn’t be less interested in that.1 But then something happened that caught me completely off-guard. I was reading a post on my friend’s personal blog. This was a guy that I knew personally and looked up to. I’ve been reading everything he had been writing for years. About two-thirds of the way through a long (and fairly insightful) blog post, I had a sudden realization that the post had been written by AI. I’m not the best at detecting this kind of thing, but once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was unmistakable. And the thing is, I didn’t feel indifferent or even disappointed, as I might have predicted. I felt betrayed. For somebody who considers themselves open-minded—even optimistic—towards the development of AI, I didn’t know where this feeling was coming from. I have theories… maybe it has something to do with the social contract between the writer and the reader. Whatever it is, I didn’t want anyone who was reading my blog (hi mom 👋) to feel the same thing. So for the sake of transparency, here is my AI usage statement: The content of this website is written by me. I do not use AI to generate the text you are reading because writing from scratch helps me process my thoughts (which is one of the main reasons I blog in the first place). I don’t currently use AI-powered writing tools (grammar-check, spell-check, dictation tools, etc), but I may experiment with them as long as they don’t undermine the thinking process. The code for this website was originally hand-written, but I have since used AI to make several useful updates. I expect to continue using AI to write code for this website and other personal coding projects. When I create a public project exclusively with AI, I mention that fact in the project README.2 I am experimenting and my AI usage may change. When it does, I’ll update the policy here on my /about page, which is where it will live long-term. To explain why, see Paul Graham's Keep your Identity Small. ↩ For an example, see s-tier ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

“You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.” I love this quote from James Clear because it hurts me in all the right ways. At my worst, I feel like my daily patterns are at war with my grand plans. When I’m fighting a daily battle and willpower is slipping, I need every reminder that this moment, right now, is critical. Because it is! Your body is the result of your daily food and exercise choices, not your healthy ambitions. Your mind is the result of your regular media choices, education environment, and adjacent relationships, not an independent observer, hovering uninfluenced above your day-to-day interactions. Your character is the result of your actual sacrifices—for others, for your integrity, and for the common good—not your generous aspirations. When I’m struggling with daily patterns, it’s helpful for me to look at the times I was rocking it. I’ve had periods of my life when my workouts were really consistant, or I journaled every day, or I always woke up early. What contributed to those things? Often, it was social pressure, an accountability buddy, or a change of environment that pushed me into a productive place (underrated benefit of having a blog: it’s a historical record of your successes and failures). Of all the things I might learn looking back at these experiences, perhaps the most important is that it’s never been easy. I’ve got 15+ years of posts documenting the battle. Sometimes I’m winning and sometimes I’m losing, but I’m always fighting, and that’s a daily pattern too. Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.

Over the last four months I’ve increased my use of AI for web dev work pretty dramatically. I use it every day at work, as do most of my coworkers. I don’t think it’s disputed anymore that AI-assisted development can save a lot of time and effort. The question is, what do we do with all that surplus? The standard narrative in the industry is to use it to go faster. Ship three features a day instead of one. Get a half-dozen agents working in parallel. 10x your productivity. If you don’t move fast, your competitors will! I get it. Speed is good and it has benefits beyond just finishing more stuff per unit time. Speed matters! But we live in an era of extreme consumer choice, especially in the world of software. Even pre-AI, there were dozens of good email clients, to-do lists, fitness apps, and analytics tools, all chock-full of useful features at reasonable prices. What is “going faster” going to give us? Even more options, with even more features? Apparently yes. In the past quarter, iOS app store submissions have risen by 84 percent, and Hackernews, “ShowHN” submissions have nearly tripled. We live in an era of software abundance. But as software grows increasingly abundant, attention grows increasingly scarce. Attention was scarce even before AI but it’s going to get worse. Consumers have more choices than ever, and increasingly those choices are becoming undifferentiated as the industry uses AI to produce them. What if we did the opposite? Instead of using your AI surplus to go faster, what if you used it to go deeper? What if, instead of building ten good features, you built two amazing ones? What if, instead of blasting out a dozen landing pages, you poured your attention and care into a home page that knocked someones socks off—one that could not have been built by an AI, because nothing like it could have been found in the training data? What if you doubled-down on performance? On accessibility? On user-experience? On creating a strong personal touch? It would stand out! That matters, arguably, even more than speed. Striking a balance The more I thought about this, the more I recognized it as the same ol’ quality vs quantity debate, where it pays to strike a balance: If we pour all our surplus time into quality, we end up hurting quality by failing to iterate. If we pour all our surplus time into quantity, we end up hurting speed as tech debt accumulates1. But what’s the ideal balance? Is it 90% quality, 10% speed? 50% - 50%? How would you spend your AI surplus? Remember: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. ↩ Thanks for reading this post via RSS! Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on the original post or sending me an email.