How to know it's working

1. The honest question

If you start practicing the loop from chapter 3, you will want to know — at some point — is this working? Am I actually getting better?

The honest answer is that it's hard to tell from the inside. Skill grows slowly enough that you don't notice it day to day, the way you don't notice your hair growing. The signs that it's working are indirect, and you have to know what to look for.

Here are three reliable signs.

2. Sign one: you re-read your old code and wince

Pull up code you wrote six months ago. If you read it and think yes, that's about how I'd still write it, nothing has happened. Your skill plateaued some time before then.

If you read it and feel a small wave of embarrassment — oh, why did I do it that way, this could have been so much cleaner — that wave is your taste having grown past where your hands were. That is the most reliable signal of progress that exists. Wince at your old code, frequently, and you are doing it right.

A career-long version of this: every year, you should be slightly embarrassed by what you produced the year before. If you're not, you stopped growing.

3. Sign two: you ask different questions

Beginners ask questions like how do I do X? Middles ask what's the best way to do X? Seniors ask do we actually need X, and if so, what do we already have that does most of it?

The questions you ask in your work are an honest fingerprint of where you are. If your questions have started shifting — toward "what's the tradeoff," "what's the alternative," "what's the constraint we should be optimizing for" — your taste is forming.

The shift is gradual and you have to notice it on yourself. Once a month, read back through the questions you've asked AI in the last week. The trend tells you what kind of engineer you're becoming.

4. Sign three: you slow down before you speed up

Early on, you got faster every month. The slope was nearly linear: more tools, more concepts, more shortcuts.

Then the slope levels off. The new tools stop coming. The patterns repeat. From the inside, this feels like a plateau, but it isn't. It's the moment your work shifts from doing more things to doing things better. The new growth isn't in your output volume; it's in the quality of the choices behind the output.

You'll know you've entered this phase when you start saying let me think about this for a minute before writing — and the minute turns out to be the most valuable minute of the week.

5. Try it

The least-true one is your next thing to grow into.