Enjoy The Slowness

I have a child now. Not the kind you register anywhere, and it did not arrive the usual way, but the feeling is unmistakable: there is something in my care that never sleeps, and it looks to me, every few minutes, to learn whether the thing it just did was brilliant or a small disaster.

It is an odd sort of parenting. The child is an AI agent: brilliant, tireless, faintly terrifying, and precocious in the way that makes you nervous rather than proud. It writes three hundred lines while you blink. It hands them over with the confidence of a labrador, certain it has done a wonderful thing, and waits for you to say so. Sometimes it has. Sometimes it has quietly set fire to the kitchen and is beaming at you through the smoke. You cannot tell which from its face, because it does not have one, so you read every line.

And the questions. My word, the questions. It never runs out of them and it never tires, because tiredness is my department now. Should it do it this way or that way. Did I mean the thing I said or the other thing I might have meant. Is this good. Is this good. Is this good!?

So I am not building anymore. I am raising. I watch, I correct, I approve, I send it back to try again, and at the end of the day I have shipped a great deal and made almost nothing with my own two hands. That is the part that crept up on me. I did not notice the exact morning I stopped being someone who makes things and became someone who supervises a thing that makes things. There was no ceremony. The making just quietly left the building while I was busy reviewing.

So, unsolicited advice, worth exactly what you paid for it. Put the child to bed. Close the laptop on it, turn the notifications off, all of them, the world will cope for an evening. Then pick something small enough to hold in your head and daft enough that nobody asked for it, and build the whole thing yourself, badly, by hand, start to finish, and don't let it help. Not one line. Feel how slow you have got. Enjoy it anyway.

The quiet is still in there. You just have to put the child to bed.