Did some math on my GitHub velocity, and I didn’t find what I expected.
Get this.
I don’t want to say I wasn’t active on GitHub before AI, because I was. I’ve always been active on GitHub.
You see, I am a pinko commie who earnestly believes in the subversive power of open source software.
I’ve been committed to OSS since the early SourceForge days, back when half the internet still smelled like applets, Perl and stolen script snippets.
Yes yes.
But before AI, my human-only contribution rate, including private repos, was usually somewhere around 300 to 600 commits a year.
Some years were higher. Some were lower.
Experimentation beyond the numbers
Today, that’s my daily volume.
I had one day this week where I did roughly twice that.
The work changed
Naively, when I started crunching the numbers, I assumed I would be able to point to a clean productivity gain.
And I absolutely am more productive.
It’s just not as easy to represent it cleanly in piles of numbers or columns in a spreadsheet.
It’s not an apples-to-apples measurement because the work has changed.
Before, a lot of my GitHub activity was one-off art projects, experiments born from annoyance, little acts of technical vandalism in isolated forks against things that bothered me, or old ideas dragged back into the light and made more pragmatic or elegant.
Today, I'm working within an entirely different ontology.
Obviously, I’m still doing professional work, and developing products. That’s a given. But you know what I’m doing more of now than I ever have?
Wild, collaborative experimentation. More building things simply because they are difficult to build, even with AI. I spend a lot of time chasing ideas that shouldn’t work, but somehow do.
I fail more often now too, and I relish every moment of it.
When something starts to feel too easy, you have to work harder to challenge yourself. That’s where the good stuff lives, finding the irresistible little threads hanging from the ceiling of the universe.
If you’re not tugging at the edges of what’s possible, why are you even here?
I guess what I’m saying is, I understand now that the numbers are beside the point.