I don't know whether I am capable of this
I am going to write something people rarely write while they are building.
I am not sure I have the ability to do what I am making.
This is not modesty. It is a question I genuinely ask myself, looking at machines that run, that work, and whose details I could not always re-explain to someone who asked me tomorrow.
Things that are beyond me
I build fast. Faster than I have ever built.
Tools come out. Pages come out. Texts come out with my name on them. I read them one by one, because that is my rule. And sometimes, while reading, I do not understand everything.
When that happens, we rewrite. As many times as it takes, until every sentence speaks to me. That is the one barrier I have left: if I do not understand it, it does not ship.
But the question stays. Am I building, or am I watching something get built?
The feeling that it might be an illusion
Some days all of this looks like a dream that is a little too comfortable.
Things move forward. Pages appear. Machines answer. And a small voice asks: is this real, or am I telling myself a story in which I am bigger than I am?
I looked for a way out of that question. I found an answer in the end, but it does not come from me. It comes from the machines.
In an illusion, nothing refuses.
And my day is made of refusals. A security gate blocked me three times in a row. A supplier hung up on one call out of two. A test came out red six times before going green. A server refused to let something be installed on it.
None of that happens in a dream. A dream always says yes.
What resists is real. That is the only proof I have found, and it is enough for me.
Nobody can see where this is going
The other weight is the speed.
You repair a breakdown in the morning, and by the evening the tool has changed version. You learn a skill, and three months later it is replaced by a button. You start measuring your day not in work done, but in work you had no time to understand.
And when you look for someone who knows where all this leads, you find nobody. Not the large houses that build these tools. Not the people who sell them. Not the people who write about them. Everyone is walking their own road, and nobody holds the whole map.
Neither do I. I do not have it.
What is left
So I hold on to the only thing that stays put when the ground moves: knowing where I was.
Write down the state before losing it. Cut the work into pieces, so that a fall costs only one piece. Keep a trace of what was done, and what remains. Put a closing word, so that anyone can tell without arguing whether it is finished.
It is not glorious. It is not performance. It is stubbornness.
But on a long road, stubbornness beats performance. The one who moves fast and quits at the first refusal arrives nowhere. The one who picks up at the same spot, eight times if needed, arrives.
And so
No, I do not know whether I have the ability to do everything I write.
But I know how to read what goes out under my name. I know how to say "I did not understand, let's start again". I know how to recognise a refusal when I see one, and to tell myself that it is a good sign.
Some weeks, that is the best anyone has to offer.
It is not the finest form. But it holds.