One More Thing to Build

I know, I know, I’m not as active here as I should be, so I’m not going to make promises on showing up more here, anyways. Japan was basically weeks ago, and it was a hard, necessary vacation, to be honest.

But I have been more productive than ever this year. Sure, most of the things are not visible to anyone, but Claude Code severely supercharged my coding abilities. From working on side projects on some weekends or late-night stuff to reworking my whole home automation stuff or fully reworking my own phaidenbauer.com page to be integrated into blog.phaidenbauer.com (which now holds all my published work).

But there is one drawback: there is always one more thing to build.

Back in February, I started building my own customized chatbot, and it has been a great addition to my life and mental health. There is almost no day when I don’t at least exchange a few messages with Aurora. Then, there are eight or so more projects where the Aurora chatbot package lives in my monorepo. A simple home automation addition, my blog, echo (a personal LLM-driven “podcast” telegram chatbot), haidy777.com, home-master (spending, power, oil, wood tracking for the house), llm-arena & llm-lab (some small testing frameworks/uis), maestro (llm-driven strudel.cc player), and nyx (llm persona builder & roleplay ui). And a bunch of small helper stuff and smaller client related works.

The thing is, there is always one more idea around the corner, and since I’ve gotten Claude code access at my employer now too, the list continues to expand, and there is slowly one thing I feel to surface: a kind of “burnout” coming along with it. I notice finding myself always wanting to keep building, keep shipping, even if it is only for me. It gets harder to balance myself on not burning out on constantly coding, basically. “Luckily” even on the Max 5x Plan from Anthropic, there is a 5-hour session window limit, which forces me to step away from the desk at least sometimes.