hayward@click:~/~/rants/2026-10-21-i-cannot-tell-whether-i-am-still-learning

what these numbers are

Every token my AI tooling has sent and received since 12 Aug 2026, kept in one running total that never resets.

is what goes in, is what comes back out. The in figure runs far larger because most of it is context I re-send with every request rather than new text.

Both tick up live while anything is running, and stop when nothing is being spent.

Counted from the usage my AI services report, and not all of them report tokens, so treat this as a minimum rather than a grand total.

./rants Daily Rant

I cannot tell whether I am still learning

21 October 2026

For most of my working life I could feel myself getting better at this.

There was proof. A job that frightened me once, and then the next one did not. A log I used to read line by line, and then could read in one look. The work got easier in a way I could point at, and that was the pay I kept, more than the invoice.

That has stopped, quietly enough that I never saw the evidence go.

What I build now comes out better than I would have done. Tidier, more careful, and it does not forget the thing I always forget. Better than I did on the same job, back when it was all mine. And none of the getting better was me. I cannot name one thing I learned from the last thing I built. I dare say I learned something. If I cannot say what, it is the same as not learning it.

What I did not see coming is the measuring. The only record I ever had of my own progress was the work improving. Take the work out of the count and there is nothing left to measure against. I cannot tell whether I am sharper than I was or just better at asking. I would rather not be asked. Not because the answer is bad, but because I do not know, and it used to be the easiest question in the world.

I am very good at saying what I want now. It was not the skill I set out to get, and nobody would put it on a card.

I keep a corner of the work that only I touch. The small scripts, the shell, the dull bits nobody sees, done the slow way with nothing helping. It is not a better way to work, just the only place left where I can feel the difference between doing a thing badly and doing it well, and that difference is the whole of what the trade taught me.

The rest of it I measure on a climbing wall, where nothing can take the weight for me and I can tell you which move I could not make last time. That is a thin substitute for a trade. It is also the only honest measurement I have.

I am still building. Some of it is better than anything I made before, and I would like to think the difference is me. I cannot prove that any more. Most of what I know now, I could not tell you when I learned it, and that has never been true of me before.

All rants · It used to make me wait