Lab Notebooks

Nelson Elhage wrote Software Engineers should keep lab notebooks discusses the value of keeping detailed notes - more than just a screen recording, including notes on intent (on what you were trying to do or how you were interpreting results.) The article emphasizes it primarily for retrospective analysis (both immediate and longer term) but I've also found that one side effect of keeping such detailed notes (in a searchable manner) is that you can also find that snippet of awk code or those weird lsblk arguments you figured out that time, even if the problem itself is unrelated.

(See also Lab Notebooking for the Software Engineer for basic mechanisms for applying this technique.)

• Advantage over AI: snippets that actually work and you have a clear record that they did, what happened, and when - "Oh $this stopped working after 16.04 and we need to figure out $that instead" is important.