the umpteenth Locking In

I go through these cycles where I lose focus on my goals, the startups I'm building and the things I want to accomplish in life and just let bullshit take over my attention. I'm really bad about getting motivated instead of disciplined, where I get a sprint of motivation for a week where I bang out code and then it falls off.

This works badly for things like hobbies, but I want to be a startup founder full time. I want to build very large things. I want to get really good at certain skills and make a difference in the world. You really can't do that on small sprints.

So, here is to another Locking In.

Focus 1: ScrollWise AI

ScrollWise is one of my primary startup focuses. It's designed to make it easier to save content that's useful for your research into topics, and inject those resources into your conversations with LLMs. So, instead of relying on LLMs to find relevant content for your searches, you feed it the information that's relevant to you.

It's launched and I have a few (free) users, but there are a lot of features and bug fixes I want to push to make it more useful. I'm planning to market it to students, especially grad students working on things like literature reviews, so getting a ton done over the summer, getting the browser extension accepted into the right stores, etc. will be super useful when school starts back in August.

Focus 2: Tursas AI

Tursas is an observability tool for AI agents, so when something goes wrong with one of your agents while it's working, you can debug it easier. It will also make it easier to create new skills for agents, debug existing tooling, etc.

Think of it like an advanced debug/trace log built specifically for agents. You can view prompts, tool calls, tool call results, etc. all in one pane. I'm trying to get it to a point where it can be implemented into Hermes, my favorite agent framework, so folks can start using it.

Focus 3: Writing

I've written a good bit on my blog about lots of different topics, from The Crusades and their effects on modern day politics to Dune to software development. I recently started the hundomentals project with the intent of going back to study a lot of different topics, from security and hacking to software development and AI, from a fundamentals-first perspective.

I want to write more, because writing is inherently useful in an era full of slop. It's also incredibly useful for learning. I want to get back to writing fiction and worldbuilding as well because I get a lot of inspiration for my own projects from writing science fiction.

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I have a lot of other focuses (fitness for an Iron Man race next year, gardening and raising chickens, several other dev projects) but the biggest thing I need is to figure out how to replace short-term motivation with long-term discipline.

I got codex to spin up a quick browser extension that blocks content on X (to where it's basically write-only) and all recommended videos on YouTube (so I watch only the video I searched for and don't get snagged by the feed), and then I added a pomodoro timer and a To Do list. You can see the end result here. I think it'll be pretty helpful, but if I don't develop better discipline, I'll just turn the extension off and keep scrolling slop.

The thing I need is habits, things I'm going to repeat over and over. Simple things that build momentum into something bigger. The couple I've landed on:

• push to production on at least one project every day
• write one article and push it to the blog every day, even if it's incomplete
• 4h building every day
• 2h marketing every day
• journal every day (already good at this)

I think if I can execute on that, that's 20h+ of coding and 10h+ of marketing every week. That's solid.

The hardest part is just showing up every day and doing it.