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                    "(ai slop graphic... I know. Purposeful because I don\u2019t control human psychology)\n        \n        I\u2019ve re-read Sunil Pai\u2019s \u201cthe senior engineer death spiral\u201d several times this week. It\u2019s very good. If you haven\u2019t read it, start there.\n\n        It\u2019s resonating with me because I think almost every senior engineer has felt some version of being stuck. You get good at what you do, then things change, and the experience you\u2019ve built up can make it hard to approach things differently.\n\n        (Also, still getting over the fact that this is a different Sunil in software engineering.)\n\n        Pai talks about focusing on momentum instead of outcomes, and I fully agree. When I\u2019m stuck, I break the work down to the smallest thing I can actually accomplish. Getting something done usually helps me figure out what to do next.\n\n        After sitting with his post, I kept coming back to first principles thinking.\n\n        I\u2019ve been lucky to work with and manage a lot of great senior engineers. When I think about what made them great, I keep landing on the same thing: they seemed to know what needed to be done. There\u2019s an intuition there that I\u2019ve always admired.\n\n        Some of the best I\u2019ve worked with came from customer support or services. Others taught themselves to code or started as designers or entrepreneurs. They took different paths into engineering, but they shared a habit of thinking from first principles.\n\n        They\u2019d ask why we were building something and what it would do for the people using it. They could connect what was happening in the codebase to what was happening outside it. That understanding helped them keep things simple.\n\n        I think that\u2019s another way to build the momentum Pai describes. Consider the simplest thing you could do first. It\u2019s often enough.\n\n        Transitioning to the agentic era\n\n        I\u2019ve had a lot of conversations with friends and coworkers about the shift to agentic development. The people who seem to be vibing with it are usually the ones who already think this way.\n\n        This is the first major \u201csimulation switch-up\u201d where I\u2019ve really had to embrace how much I don\u2019t know. The engineers I see keeping up with what\u2019s possible are willing to put what they know in a box for a while as they work with agents. They\u2019ll try something before assuming an old constraint still applies.\n\n        Put it in a box\n\n        This is the hard part for me. Take your experience, what you\u2019ve learned, and what you currently believe is true, and set it aside long enough to look at the problem again.\n\n        I still want to draw on that experience. But it\u2019s easy to let a past project or a familiar technical limitation decide the answer before I\u2019ve understood the problem in front of me.\n\n        When I step back and ask what we\u2019re actually trying to do, why it matters, and how the pieces connect, I usually find more ways forward than I expected.\n\n        There\u2019s been a lot of talk about what\u2019s real with AI and what\u2019s inflated. I think if you set your experience aside and look at what\u2019s possible with fresh eyes, there\u2019s a whole lot to admire, and a lot worth rethinking. Approaching it from first principles means starting with what we\u2019re trying to do and asking how AI could help. It\u2019s easy to get excited about the technology before you\u2019ve answered that question.\n\n        That brings me back to the momentum Pai describes. First principles thinking makes working that way feel natural. When you truly understand what you\u2019re trying to accomplish, it\u2019s easier to take a small step, learn from it, and keep going. If you\u2019re doing it right, working with agents lets that back-and-forth happen much faster. You get faster learning loops and more momentum, oriented around deep understanding. To me, that\u2019s the new flow state.\n        Long Live Human Thinking."
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