The Missing Log Entry
Two weeks without training, everything shipped, and a low mood I couldn't explain until my journal showed what was missing.
For two weeks I didn’t train. Not on purpose. Work and uni just ate the hours where the gym used to be.
And I still shipped everything. Releases went out, the next ones got prepared, and I submitted a paper plus two theses to conferences 😄
The paper is about tool granularity in MCP: how big or small a tool should be before an agent in production starts using it badly. It’s useful twice, because it also confirms the architecture choices we’d already made at work.
Two days after I submitted it, I found a paper from a Chinese team doing very similar work.
Honestly, that’s good news. It means I’m on the right track.
It didn’t feel like good news. For a week and a half I was low and couldn’t say why. Everything I’d planned was done, and I still felt flat.
So I opened my journal and scrolled back, looking for whatever had gone wrong. I found it by what wasn’t there: no workout entries. Two weeks of them, missing.
On Friday I went to boxing as usual and had a great sparring session. I scored points and stayed focused every round. Even the coach said I was awesome.
My main strategy is simple: the head of AI cannot get punched in the head.
That evening my wife asked how my day was. I told her the whole week was awesome.
Nothing about the week had changed since that morning. One sparring session rewrote how I remembered all of it.
I think sport is how I clear the fog. It’s the closest thing I have to hunting: someone in front of me trying to land a punch, and every part of me switched on to make sure they don’t. My head seems to need that charge before it gives me the rest.
So next week I’m back to the gym and boxing, chasing a new personal max.
That’s how I beat my personal max in cyberspace, too.