Daniel Wentsch

Fuck productivity. You are more than your work – and more than your output. You deserve to spend your finite time on Earth on your own concerns. A life should have more to it than bare neoliberal necessity and empty authoritarian compulsion.

Keeping a journal is one step in the direction of productivity-free autonomy. It encourages you to take a

Er war einfach nur anders, ich meine, anders als die meisten. Aber viele Leute sind anders als die meisten. Zum Beispiel Olli Zack mit seinem Stottern. Oder Konrad unterm Torbogen am Fluss. Und sowieso: Katinka. Sie setzte sich immer wieder vor die Wand und meditierte. Sie lernte freiwillig Französisch. Sie dachte sich eine Kollektion aus. Ich war

The code you produce using LLMs is pure cognitive debt. You have no idea what it’s doing, only that it seems to be doing what you want it to do. You don’t have a mental model for how it works, and you can’t fix it if it breaks in production. Such a codebase is not an asset but a liability. I predict that in 1-3 years we’re going see organizations

The artifacts you produce as the result of your hard work are not important. They are incidental. The work itself is the point. When you do the work, you change and grow and become more yourself. Work—especially creative work—is an act of self-love if you choose to see it that way.

Some people see the need for writing code as an impediment to getting good use out of a computer. In fact, some of the most avid fans of generative AI believe that the act of actually doing the work is a punishment. They see work as unnecesary friction that must be optimized away. Truth is, the friction inherent in doing any kind of work—writing,