The Habits of Writing

I hardly ever wrote down journals as a kid. I always had these ideas and abstractions in my head that I couldn't articulate properly. Sometimes, I just walk around thinking about them. This probably continued throughout my teenage years and also current time. I still caught myself off guard just walking around the chicken wandering in my own thoughts. Is this thinking, brainstorming, or just my ADHD mind kicking in with all its noisy thoughts? Now, I realized that these kinds of mini essay notes are great way to calm my mind and structure my noisy and scattered thoughts.

For the next few years, I want to get into the habits of writing a mini essay every day. Their length can range from just a few sentences to completed paragraphs or blogs, highly depending on the ideas I'll have at that time. I should also keep track of the dates on these mini essays. By doing so, I can make a visualization of all the mini essays I've written. I can also add a proof read mechanism to fix any grammatical errors I'll probably make.

Neovim should be my go-to text editor or even PKMS from now on. It's a clean and minimalistic text editor for me. No more Notion or Obsidian. Having Obsidian for visualization can still be pretty useful.Yeah, but the autocompletion is great for me since I always have words on top of my tounge that I just couldn't remember. The autocompletion helps a lot i writing. I should turn off the AI autocompletion by Codeium while writing though. They're kinda annoying and not that useful when I'm trying to write in my own words. This kinda replicate the AI coding assistant that we're using with ChatGPT, Claude, or Mistral. Sometimes, to write good writing or code, you need to put some of your own personal flavors and tastes to it. The AI-assisted tools deplete that. I feel like you may work slower but at least you get to ensure that your writing and code is good according to your own tastes and standards.

Maybe a good solution for the AI-supported thingy is writing a good prompt in your own style, forcing the models to replicate your writing style, although this is highly unlikely. Similar to a lot of coding agents nowadays, they always have a file called "knowledge.md" or "rules.md" that force the AI to follow a few concrete standards in coding like writing tests or comments. However, this is problably still not sufficient enough since most of the time, your programminng tastes lie within the logic that you have and that is kinda difficult for an LLM to replicate via just a markdown prompt. They can be helpful in modifiying and editing the final code but are not good enough to help you write perfectly good code in the first place. This may raise a need for a model that is trained high quality code and writing data instead of just shotgunning all the scraped data from the internet into the model. Another approach can be developing a good enough reasoning modle that can infer what are good codes from their training data although this is still far from perfect.

Again, I am wandering in my thoughts. Transitioning from talking about the topic of writing, now, the essay has smoothly moved to the topic of the capabilities of LLM in writing and coding. That is probaly my ADHD kicking in again and one solution for this is writing an outline first in the beginning then slowly elaborate on each one. By doing this, I'll probably avoid digressing to different topics. This has been a very nice experiment of writing. If I founded a company in the future, I would want to push the culture of writing in the team. Writing clear and concise memo and report is such an underrated skills. A good memo that can communicate an insights and results to every roles in the company is much better than a long and tiring meeting. English is an universal medium that everyone can understand. This again reminds me of writing clean code. A good and well-formatted code can influential for other developers to read and build upon it regardless of their skill levels. I think the same go for a good writings in the company. A good and concise writing can help every positions in the company to be on the same page and goal of the company. Instead of building upon code, other roles can build upon new ideas.

I wonder if this markdown extension has a words count feature. That'd be nice to see how many words I've been ranting so far. Nvim is such a weird tool. This seem like something that could have been made in the 90s with Vim but every hardcore developers are still using it. It's like the current software that we have does not change much in how we work as developers. I mean you can still see Nvim it's like VSCode with much more customizations. I guess it's code editors have not evolved that much. Nowadays, even with AI integrations, the code editors' premise still remain the same.

The same thing is going on with writing. We are not going to find an innovated solution for writing in the next few decades. Then, I feel like the most minimalistic solution is always the best eventually. The next trends in both writing and coding is likely to be going back to the old age. We'll eventually realized that all these tools are unnecessary and clunky. We'll all go back to a simpler medium of text and code. The same can go for social media and interactions but that's a story for another essay.