I have a bad habit of falling into despair about my perceived lack of progress with “problem solving”. I’ve had endless long conversations with AIs about this, which is stupid, but I do it because, believe it or not, it makes me articulate the problem, so to speak.
Good example just happened this morning. I’m redoing my blog site (yeah, again, I know) and figured I’d better get a robots.txt and sitemap.xml going, because I’m not using a static site generator and these things are not auto-generated, I have to do it.
Let’s take robots.txt as an example. Rather than just sit with this a second and actively think about what needed to be done, I fell into the old panic mode of feeling blank. So, what did I do? Turned to my best friend Claude.
It did what I should be learning to do. It broke down this nebulous thing into a set of steps. Basically, you just need to put the content into a text file and serve it up on a route, just like I was already doing with CSS, JavaScript, any static file.
This journey in programming, fundamentally, is about seeing small steps and patterns, then learning to draw from them. My issue here combined several patterns I already knew, but this kind of blankness, which at worst turns into panic, is my single biggest hurdle to overcome.
It won’t change overnight and will only come with practice. The key though is to actually practice and do the work. This is where the struggle lies for me.
So, after all that, my challenge for today? Get my darned robots.txt served without the AI writing it for me.
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