Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”:

the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

My hypothesis is that the very structure of the chatbot interface (type, read, type again) actively discourages reflection. When you are moving too fast, you get stuck in a groove. You literally need to take a break, step back, and basically step out of this groove so you can view the problem from a new angle. We’ve all walked away from a tough problem only to have the solution arrive unbidden into our thoughts later in the day.

In my decades+ experience designing and developing software, I can’t count the number of times I’ve stepped away from a problem at the computer only to return and find the problem magically resolved in my brain.

But the human-computer interaction of prompting doesn’t encourage the use of that skill in our subconscious.

In fact, I think it actively discourages it (our tools shape us).

Scott talks about this Japanese concept called “Ma” which is about deliberately creating pauses between things. He quotes Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki who says “if you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness.” Here’s Scott (emphasis mine):

Ma provides a framework for understanding that a pause is not a lack of work

As humans we need pauses. We need space to breathe. We need time to digest.

Pausing, breathing, synthesizing, digesting — these are all necessary work.

“Digestion” is an interesting word here.

Putting food in your body is merely the beginning of feeding yourself. Our bodies must digest that food, break it down, absorb it, and get rid of the waste.

But that’s all happening mostly without our attentive oversight, so I guess it’s not “real” work — right?

Wrong.

Building good, healthy software requires digestion.