Putting a Lid on Thought

On a train to the sauna with a friend, I am scribbling notes on my iPhone.

Normally, I would spend this commute checking on branding and traction for my open-source projects, or poking at AI agents and just watching the stream go by. Am I actually catching up on new technology when I do that? Not really. I am just drifting along with the current while the train moves.

Until recently, building a single screen or API could take a full week. I would write code by hand in a programming language, and there was a distinct feeling of getting into the zone. Lately, that feeling has all but disappeared. While an agent is working, I am just there watching over it. I am not good at multitasking either, so I cannot chat with another agent in parallel and jump back when the first one finishes. It feels like a void. Sometimes I wonder if I can even call myself a software engineer like this.

Over the past six months, I have been learning how to think philosophically from books like The Ethics of Leisure and Boredom (Hima to Taikutsu no Rinrigaku) and The Art of Organizing Thought (Shiko no Seirigaku). More than simply trying to stay who I am, I have been trying to build a foundation for how I see life so that my thinking does not get completely taken over by AI.

Because of those books, I wanted to hold my life up to what I had read and leave a marker for how I want to live from here on. That is why, today, I stopped watching the stream on my screen, threw my thoughts out of that loop, and started writing instead.

People cannot stay in the same place. As I wrote in an earlier article, to borrow Pascal’s words, human beings cannot bear to sit quietly in a room. That is why they go out hunting rabbits, and no matter how badly they wanted something, they quickly get used to having it. Hedonic adaptation kicks in. In terms more familiar to us, it feels close to being stuck in a comfort zone.

It was like that when I decided to leave my previous job for my current one, and it is a struggle I have been carrying for about a year at my current company too. At work, I burn through tokens every day to push tasks forward, yet there is no real stimulation, and I do not feel like I am growing much either.

I used to wonder if making “I” the subject of “growth” goes against belonging to an organization or a team, and if that might be a weakness of mine. Honestly, though, I do not think it is a weakness I need to fix. Pushing through with my own ego and madness is far more interesting, and I feel like it leads to a better place anyway. Rather than feeling out of step with the organization, in an era where nobody knows the right answer, maybe “I” just need to keep thinking in order to find one answer of my own.

Looking back, I feel like I have spent my whole life thinking about how to resolve the discomfort of the present moment. Whenever a situation is out of my control, I immediately turn the arrow on myself, assuming something is lacking in me, and I try to sharpen another technical skill to fill that discomfort. Even at this very moment, I am probably typing these words with that same mindset.

Even so, there is still something that fires me up and pulls me into the zone: building developer platforms.

Merely watching an AI agent run feels like a void, but the mechanisms underneath that allow the agent to work demand real experience and taste. I am deeply interested in preparing custom harnesses so the agent’s inner loop of writing code and running tests spins smoothly, and turning that into an outer-loop foundation for the whole organization. And on my own time, partly to blow off steam, I am building TerraDart, a type-safe IaC tool for Dart.

When I build these tools, what I care about is offering abstractions that make the concrete easy to reach.

I used to play music. With a hand-me-down electric guitar from my father, and a multi-effects pedal and looper I saved up my allowance to buy, I loved layering sounds from a single guitar to make loop music. It felt like pottery, building up layers of sound one by one, and once I got absorbed in it, there were nights I could not sleep until a piece was finished.

On the guitar, there is a main phrase and there are the finer layers of backing chords and rhythm supporting it underneath. Thinking about how to layer those backing sounds so the main phrase rings out cleanly feels very close to hiding complex procedures behind a black box and deciding how to expose an API that feels effortless for users.

“Abstraction” sounds difficult, but it is everywhere around us. Mobile apps and web systems present complicated real-world procedures to users as a UI. Because of that, users can buy things, register tasks, or add friends without knowing what happens underneath. At my previous job, I watched a workflow where nurses routed paper approvals to doctors become a single button in an electronic medical record system. The steps did not disappear; they were hidden behind the button so the person using it no longer had to think about them. That, to me, is abstraction.

In the context of software engineering, this means giving Dart developers and AI a public interface (a CLI, API, Skill, and so on) so they can accomplish their goal without knowing the complicated steps underneath. With TerraDart, you can write Dart classes and stand up infrastructure without knowing HCL. Writing everything in the same language from start to finish lowers cognitive load for both humans and AI. Conversely, when something is hard to use, I think its abstraction has failed.

In this age of AI, it also matters what kind of background a creator has, what they built, and how they share it. Beyond packaging complex operations into a library or framework, you have to convey to engineers around the world, in your own words, why it is good, what problem background it captures, and what it solves.

Those words inevitably carry the thirty years of how I have lived and my habits in relating to people. Maybe I think this way because I once aimed for DevRel, but pouring all of my thinking into what I build and how I express it feels close to the work of an artist. That becomes my value.

Still, when you build things, you apparently need the practice of “putting a lid on it.” As The Art of Organizing Thought explains, human beings organize the day’s thoughts through sleep, so something that looked great yesterday can look not so great when you wake up in the morning. Or you go to sleep thinking about A, and wake up with a solution to an unrelated B. That happens all the time in both engineering and beat-making. A beat that sounded incredible at night can sound completely flat the next morning, and you wipe it clean. That is how clear your brain is when you wake up.

I understand this in my head, yet putting a lid on things scares me every time.

My attention scatters easily by nature. Even while reading a document at work, I can catch myself drifting to another train of thought, wondering how to develop a hobby. Conversely, when worries or anxieties pile up at work or in life, I cannot immerse myself in the hobbies I love either. When I am in a 1-on-1 with a team member squeezed between other projects and solo development, I at least need to put a lid on my own work, yet it keeps tugging at me. I want to reorganize the argument for a weekly project deck, or I start wondering how a coding agent’s implementation and tests are going. I mean no harm, and I genuinely enjoy talking with people, but the inside of my head is relentlessly busy. Even when I put a lid on the pot of my thoughts, the inside is boiling so hard that the lid rattles and the thoughts bubble over.

If solo development and open-source work become the center of my life like this, even the time I spend with family and friends risks becoming absent-minded.

I also think I am afraid of growing older as the years pass. Driven by a compulsion to hurry before it is too late, I increasingly judge any new endeavor by whether I can finish it in a single day. With the guitar, it used to be that precisely because I could not play a song at first, practicing for months until I finally could, and watching my range expand bit by bit, was what made me happy. Not only as an engineer, but as a person in everyday life, I realized how often I abandon the practice of putting a lid on things.

Even so, the reason I felt ready to try putting a lid on things this time was that reading The Art of Organizing Thought made me see how sleep genuinely sorts out the mind and lets you look at things from a clearer vantage point. Believing a book blindly is no good either, but nothing starts unless you try it once.

According to the book, human beings cannot grasp the “unknown” directly; we can only imagine it by combining what is already “known.” Elementary school children have very little that is “known” yet, which is why they systematically learn Japanese and arithmetic first as a known foundation.

For me, the practice of putting a lid on things had always been unknown territory. Normally I would try to finish a blog post like this in a single day, too, but this time I put a lid on it and waited until the second day.

Letting it sit overnight and rereading what I wrote on the train yesterday, my head really is clearer, and the words flow. Come to think of it, the same holds true for human relationships as well as for making things and working. Just as you need to put a lid on work when spending time with family and friends, stepping away from family and friends for a few hours to have time alone can, in turn, make you appreciate their presence even more. Whether in making things, working with AI, or relating to people, we need the distance of putting a lid on things for a while.

Throwing my thoughts out of open source, work, and daily routines to write like this is also an important practice for sharpening my thinking right now.

And what I am writing here is nothing more than the thinking of Nozomi Koborinai as of November 2026. As new experiences turn the unknown into the known one piece at a time, and as the combinations available to me grow, my thinking will surely change again. Even this impatience and this urge to rush through life might completely transform one day.

So that my thinking is not completely taken over by AI, and so that I can cherish the people around me, I want to keep valuing this time to put a lid on things.