The Reload Cost

#The Reload Cost

Deep focus wasn't a virtue. It was a response to a cost that AI has quietly removed.

The weather has turned, which in the UK counts as an event. I'm in the garden with a coffee and a book, and for once the book is winning. It's The Only Way Is West, a walk along the Camino de Santiago, the better part of five hundred miles across northern Spain with everything you need carried on your back. I love this stuff. Travel writing, walking memoirs, long linear journeys with a start, a finish, and not much in between except the next step. I've always filed it under escapism. Sitting here in the sun, I'm starting to think it's more specific than that.

Behind the book, quiet but never off, is the pull to work. I don't resent it. I like it, mostly. That constant urge to build and tinker is the thing that made me a software engineer in the first place, and it's the thing clients come back for. I'm a builder of digital doodads who always delivers. That reputation wasn't an accident and I'm not shy about it.

But the urge comes with a watchful eye that never quite closes. It scans for new trends, curious technologies, the shiny thing two clicks away, and it leaves a trail. I have a long, slightly embarrassing spectrum of unfinished git repos, each one an experiment that reached the point where I understood the thing and then stopped, never quite becoming something worth sharing with the world. A graveyard, if you're feeling dramatic. A junk drawer, if you're being honest.

Here is the part I keep circling. The walk on the page is the exact opposite of how I work. One path, one direction, west. You cannot flit on a pilgrimage. You cannot open six tabs and leave them humming. There is the road and the next step and the cathedral at the end, and the whole appeal is that you are doing precisely one thing with your whole self.

I did this once for real. My brother Adam and I walked Hadrian's Wall, east from Bowness-on-Solway, wild camping the eighty-four miles to Wallsend, fifteen kilos on my back and eighteen on his. We set off in November, which was a decision. Cold, wet, the days so short we spent hours walking in the dark by headtorch, the world shrunk to the small bobbing circle of light in front of my boots. One afternoon we were low on water, soaked through and leaning into the wind, when we found a tap set into a wall. We were thrilled. It didn't work. We came round the next corner and there was a cafe, open and warm, and I am not exaggerating when I say the soup, crusty bread and hot coffee rearranged my understanding of luxury. That is what the narrowness does. Shrink the world to the next step and a bowl of soup becomes enormous. The scenery helped, the wall riding the hills with horses and sheep and cattle for company. But the thing I carried home wasn't the view. It was the quiet of having exactly one thing to do.

On the approach to Carlisle we hit a flooded underpass, the path simply gone under a temporary lake. I still have the photo of Adam, bandana on, slumped at the edge of the water that had closed the path. I was scanning it for a way through like a bug newly surfaced in code review, turning it over, hunting the clean fix. We dreamed of a kayak washing up at the water's edge, the simple solution, but the November days were too short for dreams and wishes. So we went with brute force, hauling our combined thirty-three kilos of backache over gate after gate on a three-kilometre detour. In hindsight the lake was probably an overstated puddle and we should have waded it. No matter. I've made my peace with the fence; standing in the water weighing it up gets you nowhere, and the only move that counts is the one that goes forward.

Even a flooded path has a direction. The desk doesn't. The quiet of one thing at a time is gone. There was a version of this job, and I had it for years, where you put the hood up, ran the coffee in intravenously, and held one problem in its entirety until it cracked. Tunnel vision as a virtue. Those days feel over. Client expectations shifted, my own shifted with them, and the lazy assumption that AI makes everything faster has eaten the time that used to be set aside for the long stare. Now I flit. Experiment, client build, experiment, a manic context-switching dance that puts more strain on my head than the work itself does. I've built tools to manage it. I've used other people's tools to manage it. Nothing has replaced my own mind as the thing actually doing the switching.

There is one place the flitting stops, and that's the client work. It always gets finished. Partly for the obvious reasons, a happy client and a payday, but mostly for a less flattering and more reliable one. I have a superhero complex that drives me to overshoot every commitment I make. Under-promise, over-deliver. It's written into my harness, and I mean that fairly precisely. Every agent I run sits inside a harness, the scaffolding of instructions and tools that decides what it will and won't do. Turns out I'm running inside one too, biological rather than artificial, but a harness all the same, and somewhere inside it is a rule I didn't write and can't switch off. Do not quit.

The wall proved it. Adam made it three days before the cold and the weight took its toll, and he caught the bus back to Carlisle. I carried on alone to the end. The last drag out of Newcastle to Wallsend isn't scenic, and everything in you wants to stop while the city is still wrapped around you, but the harness doesn't take requests. It's the same trait that finishes every client project, and it doesn't even need a client to fire. I've already caught myself pricing up a return, solo this time, three days instead of four and a half, overshooting a commitment I made to nobody but myself. A committed line and a person waiting at the end of it, a pilgrimage with the route already marked, and the harness will not let me arrive late or light. My experiments get no such person and no such route, so they wander off and lie down.

Which leaves an uncomfortable reframe. For years I treated the flitting as a flaw, a discipline problem measured against the old ideal of the engineer who locks onto one thing. But that ideal had economics underneath it. Deep focus was the right strategy because picking work back up was expensive; reading unfamiliar code cost you an hour of reload every time you broke the trance. AI didn't make that ideal easier to reach. It pulled out the thing that made it the correct bet in the first place. When the reload cost collapses, the person who can hold six half-built things in loose orbit and drop into any one of them on demand isn't the scattered one anymore. They're the one running the new machine the way it wants to be run.

So the junk drawer isn't a confession. It's the inventory. The unfinished repos are exactly what you'd expect from someone whose real skill turned out to be breadth under switching rather than depth under focus. I spent a long time apologising for the wrong thing.

And yet. I still booked the walk. I still want the wall. Something real lived in that single line across the moors in the dark, and I don't think it's nostalgia to miss it.

Halfway along, the path climbs to Sycamore Gap, where for well over a century one tree stood alone in the dip between two crests, the wall pouring over the hills on either side like the spine of some land-bound sea serpent. Someone took a chainsaw to it one night, most probably for the social media views (idiots!). The place has the air of a shrine now, and it lowers the mood where the tree must once have lifted it. The businesses strung along the wall, half of them with a sycamore on the sign, are still absorbing the loss of a thing they'd built their name on, never owned, and could never have protected. As a one-man business I felt that one in the chest. You can lose the thing your whole identity leans on overnight, through no fault and no fix of your own, to someone else's idiot decision. It put my own small grievance back in its box. I lost a way of working to a shift in economics. They lost a living tree to vandals.

The new mode is genuinely more powerful and I wouldn't trade it back, but I notice I now have to leave the postcode to find the kind of focus that used to be there at my own desk on a wet Tuesday. I worry, too, about whoever is coming up behind me, the apprentice who may never get the years of single-track work that taught me what focus feels like, and so may never recognise what the switching is standing in for.

For now the sun is out, the coffee is good, and the man in the book is still walking west. One direction, one step. I'll get back to my fourteen open branches in a minute. Just not yet.