In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.

I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.

In which other domain can I:

* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step

* snapshot/undo

* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too

* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.

And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.

When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...

I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it.

I really like this article though. Something that stuck out to me early in my career was a master trim carpenter who told me God is in the Details.

Carpenters constantly battle physics and make dozens of little micro adjustments with the end result being something that is pleasing to the eye that will stand the test of time.

Can't help but think that translates to anything in life no matter what you're doing. Mastering those micro adjustment, whatever your craft may be, takes things to a whole new level.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...

I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.

There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the article (3 decomposition steps, as compared to thousands). If I were to never interact with reality and rely on pure reason alone, I would expect nothing humans ever do to work.

Abstraction and exploration are unreasonably effective.

Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.

There is an argument to be made for using humans, but I think we need humans to be more capable, more curious, more adaptive. LLMs are far better than the average human, but they are fundamentally inferior to the motivated human working with an LLM to augment themselves at the frontier.

Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal.

Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P

I am assuming that you put the board at the correct angle on the floor, let it go over the upper entry floor, use a ruler to extend the line of the wall over to the board, trace that, cut it, then reverse the process but this time the part you just cut can go on the floor which will produce the correct angle on the wall?

- you genuinely learn once your assumptions about how a system works break, you realize it, try differently, validate, get a better model of that system

- your interfaces must remain permissive while providing feedback, namely you provide wiggle room then only once it behaves roughly as expected do you tighten then up

No matter how many data centers are built, it is impossible to accommodate that level of detail.

> As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.

Lovely article. The older I get the more I appreciate this.

One point worth making: in many cases, after learning to see & appreciate the details, you gain the power to ignore the details that don't matter to you. This can be quite freeing.

But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%.

Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.

It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.

I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place!

... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING!

I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.

> you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

> Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.