[Cthulhu_]

There's also the dissonance between actual productivity and perceived productivity. Being fluent in vim/emacs to navigate code may feel you're hacking the matrix etc, but that in itself does not mean you're productive. Spending a morbillion tokens on orchestrating a dozen AI agents may make you feel like God, but it doesn't mean whatever they're building actually works or solves a problem. etc

[Theodores]

Paul Graham writes about this in an essay on procrastination.

Procrastination doesn't have to mean time on the couch, the person that keeps their house 'unreasonably tidy' is also procrastinating, albeit in their own special way, with feather duster and bleach. Yet they feel productive, plus there is that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' feeling after everything is spotless.

We have to guard against this with our coding setup, for example, I know people that have organised folders for their outbox emails. Management were impressed, however, I was quietly grumbling that real work needed to be done. Hence I search rather than organise email, to rarely impress management.

I like the 'contractor's desk' where there is just the laptop with no personal items, with the laptop having the default interface, wallpaper and terminal windows.

[inigyou]

This is how I feel when I ctrl-click something to jump to definition and a vim user tells me they can easily do the same thing by navigating to it with the arrow keys and pressing some obscure combination.