I come back from the park at 18:44. There's a music event at La Casa Encendida, a cultural center and it's likely to already be taking place. I want to go, but I committed a bit of the weekend to do something for a former client. There's also unfolded laundry and dirty dishes, but those could wait.
I made this game for an interactive agency two years ago, before coming to Spain. Their client then contacted me last year for a modest update (languages and a couple of fixes). I was lazy charging for it, and with my employment salary it didn't hurt. However they pinged me again this year just to change the year. I told them I would automate it for it to self-update every year, but that I had forgotten to invoice them last year, if they were so kind to make the payment but I won't hold it hostage to you, as this was my fault and it's possible this expense is not budgeted. But we didn't get there, they said yeah no problem. What are you going to do it? This weekend.
And here I am. Should I charge them or should I work first? They say it's start with the difficult part: billing. Oh god I hate it. AI is supposed to make this easy, let's give it a try.
Apple intelligence was useless, it was difficult to export the email thread to see how much I had estimated but Claude told me how much I quoted. The in Cursor I asked Opus to implement the self-updating mechanism for my ancient build system (gulp) to update the year through Netlify functions. I wanted to make the invoice too, I have a model in Figma and with the mcp server it would have been trivial, but I told them that, since they are in Belgium and I work for an invoicing company, I could send it through Peppol if it was convenient for them (for me it isn't, but dogfooding is cool).
It took me exactly one hour. God bless AI, my attention span wouldn't have been enough to do this on my own. Work is being transformed right before our eyes.
The important thing is this: we need not to produce more, we ought to enjoy our time more. What are we going to do with an evening freed up by AI? Not more AI of course! (well, unless you really want to).
...
Today at the park I proposed to myself a semi-daily handstand for my log. It's useful to record myself because I inevitably critique my form, and by doing it every day I will improve naturally. I'll start with two problems: that was a very poor vertical, and coming down can be done much more smoothly. Work on that tomorrow.
Time to go to the concert (if it's still happening).