16 Feb 2026 #experiments
Yesterday I began an week-long experiment: no social media, no feeds. I’m writing this at the end of the first day of the experiment.
Here’s what I noticed after one day without social media:
#1. Start with an intention. Usually before working, I check my email and log into Medium and other accounts to reply to comments. Today I didn’t need a website blocker since I started with an intention: no social media.
#2. Read more. I filled the slot before working with a book. I picked Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier. Then after lunch, instead of scrolling, I kept reading another book. Yes, I read more than one book at once—One strategy to read more books.
#3. Time for side projects. With the extra time, I worked on my February book project. The first draft is ready. And after a day’s break, I’m now editing it.
#4. An alarm as reminder. The other day, I found out about the 3-alarm method. I’m using it to remind me of a “Do Nothing” time to embrace boredom.
15 Feb 2026 #experiments
A post on social media convinced me to quit it for a week. Ironic, right?
The other day, a LinkedIn connection shared that “we don’t owe the Internet consistency.” It was an invitation to disappear from social media without apologizing.
That’s what I’m doing this week.
To cut phone time and embrace boredom, I’m quitting feeds for a week. That’s Medium, LinkedIn, dev.to, YouTube…
Quitting feeds frees up between 45-60 minutes each day. Yes, that’s how long I scroll down feeds on average, even when using social media consciously. Every time I open a social media app, I remind myself: “creators don’t consume.” A reminder to spend time making, not scrolling.
Even though I’m disappearing, I’ve scheduled posts so my system runs without me.
I’m planning to use that extra time to read books and finish my February book experiment. I will share the results soon.
14 Feb 2026 #writing
At times, writing (or creating anything) can feel pointless.
We don’t see results or traction. That’s when we should think we’re writing for our past selves, documenting our journey, or creating a time capsule.
But these days, my scrolling led me to How to Make a Living as an Artist. A street artist wrote it for other artists. But the next line captures the essence of writing or any other creative pursuit:
If you make something that you like, at least one person will like it — you. If you make something you think other people will like, you run the risk of no one liking it at all. That would be sad.
Write what you’d read. Code the app you’d use. Paint what you’d hang in your living room. At least one person will like it. That’s enough.
13 Feb 2026 #mondaylinks
Hey there.
Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week:
#1. When coding was the bottleneck, we used 2-pizza teams. Now, with AI writing decent code, we have to rethink team organization. AI is turning teams into 1-pizza teams (7min) while creating new roles.
#2. Most of us coders are problem solvers at heart. The worst part is that makes us addicted to being useful (6min).
#3. We are at a turning point of our career as coders (5min). Software’s first “season” is over. But the next one will be “more interesting, more economically valuable, and more mentally stimulating than we can imagine right now.”
#4. Anthropic found that over-relying on AI leads to a “statistically significant decrease in mastery.” A truth everybody already knows (2min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about the stats that deflate the AI hype (2min) (more revealing that Anthropic’s study) and how I’m embracing boredom (3min) (My phone screen time was quite shocking).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Street-Smart Coding, 30 lessons to help you code like a pro. From Googling to clear communication, it covers the lessons you don’t learn in tutorials. It’s now out on Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
Until next Friday. Keep coding smartly
Cesar
12 Feb 2026 #coding
In the days of StackOverflow, we had to verify answers. Now, too often, we accept AI’s output without question.
Catching AI red-handed
Today, in another adventure with AI, I asked Copilot to turn a couple of SQL table definitions into mapping classes for Entity Framework Core. It was the classical 1-to-many relationship.
The problem came when I asked it to generate an API endpoint to store a parent record with a bunch of child records. Something like: create a parent record, then read a table to create its children.
Its first solution was to persist the parent record. Then inside a loop, persist every child record. The classical N+1 problem. Well, the inverse one. Arrggg!
When I prompted it to change it, saying there was no need for the loop, it replied with a “Yes, you can simplify it that way.” Caught you Copilot!
Why coding skills still matter
The N+1 problem was something I could find on the spot.
Now imagine how many AI answers we blindly accept without question. When coding, documenting, researching, testing…
Coding skills still matter. Without them, we wouldn’t even notice the problem.
Blindly trusting AI is what makes us say AI kills CS degrees, what makes us dangerously lazy.
Reviewing the code AI spits out puts in the top 50% of coders. The other 50% don’t always review. You need your coding muscles for that.
AI is like a semi-autonomous car. It always needs hands on the wheel. Build skills. Then leverage AI.
To help you build hype-proof skills, I wrote Street-Smart Coding. Because syntax alone won’t make you stand out.