There's some software that really doesn't require my brain. I gave Astra an ssh key for root on a little Pi Zero with a microphone attached and asked it to make recordings of a siren going off in our neighbourhood, based on a couple of sirens. This would have been a great deal of work a couple of years ago, now it's a few tokens, and honestly, it doesn't really matter if it's shitty code, I just want the timestamps.

Then there's the software that I write for a living, and almost my entire day is now spent making hard decisions. /grilling gives me difficult technical design decisions endlessly and I am forever doing product management on features from agents. My brain is back in CTO mode, which isn't what I'd planned for myself after I'd left that particular cursed path, but fine. I am doing the opposite of turning my brain off, because I no longer can just chill out and mindlessly write code.

Both these states can exist simultaneously. But my brain work has shifted into something different, while getting no less intense.