Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Build trivial things to learn
A Chassis to Learn On
Catching up feels impossible, and there is a lot of seriousness around AI. The remedy is to use every model and build trivial things for no other reason than having a chassis to learn the technology on.
Work That Collapses
The work that once needed a PM to write the spec, one or two engineers, and a plan for QA now collapses into a command. Nobody has to worry about any of that, and the project ships with unit tests at 90 percent coverage.
Practice Over Output
It is like arranging a Zen rock garden. Much of it is low-stakes work and the output barely matters, which is why everybody talks about coding agents and very few people show their work. Agency and taste are a practice, and doing it and exercising it is how you get better.
Why are Zen rock gardens raked?
Dry landscape gardens, called karesansui, appeared in Japanese Zen temples centuries ago. Raking gravel into lines suggests flowing water around islands of stone. Monks rake the patterns as part of temple upkeep, and the lines are redone after any disturbance. The garden at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto is often described as having fifteen stones arranged so that one is hidden from any single viewpoint.
How does test coverage get measured?
Test coverage tools record which lines of code run while the test suite executes. The percentage is the share of lines, or branches, that ran at least once. A line can run during a test without any check on its result, so coverage shows what was executed, not what was verified. JaCoCo, Istanbul, and coverage.py are common tools for Java, JavaScript, and Python.
How does practice build intuition?
Psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues described deliberate practice in a 1993 paper on violinists in Berlin. They found the top group had accumulated about 10,000 hours of practice by age 20, more than less accomplished peers. The practice involved tasks pitched just beyond current ability, with feedback. Malcolm Gladwell later popularized the figure as the 10,000-hour rule.