A Harness for the Mind

It was a balmy Friday afternoon and I had just walked in the door from grocery shopping when I received an urgent-sounding message from Ilyas Landikov. We’d been pairing up on some software projects recently, one of which was Easely. He was also using Easely to do his work, which made some alarm bells go off in my head when I received his message. Perhaps he found some workflow-shattering bug which would threaten the business.

“Hey there. Free for a quick chat?” is all he wrote.

A flash of worry came over me with the feeling of anxiety creeping up from my stomach and into my throat. It may have been 12:30 PM for me, but it was 12:30 AM for Ilyas. I swallowed hard, “yeah, what’s up?” I played it cool - no need to let my over-active mind take over. I took controlled breaths as I headed up to my computer to hop on a call, for his only response to my question was link to a Google Meet session.

Breaking the News

I saw him looking into the camera, eyes wider than normal and looking somewhat distant. I’d seen this look before, after he’d been on a task for quite some time. “I needed to talk. I’ve been struggling with this major refactoring for a week and I was just about ready to throw it all away and start over. Then I decided to pop this task into Easely and two hours later, I was done!”

I blinked, then slowly felt a smile creep across my face. Moments later, I was beaming and saw that Ilyas was as well! Easely had led him down a short path to a simple solution which he discovered one step at a time. He described his process of working with Easely to affect the required changes upon his code. “Do I need that? No, I can do without it… Ok, that’s done. What’s next? Oh, that’s done, too. What’s left? Nothing! Wait, did I really do it already? No freaking way! I’m done!” The sudden completion and quick turn around of the work surprised Ilyas.

After he recounted his experience with Easely, he looked inwards and ran his hands through his hair. “We have harnesses for synthetic neural networks, but Easely is like a harness for the biological neural network! Our brain’s attention is so scattered and we don’t even realize it, but Easely helps me focus.”

In the classic style of Ilyas, he shared his gratitude. “This is amazing! Thank-you so much!”

You are welcome!

I am loving that Ilyas has found such a positive impact with a deterministic tool for humans.

Easely is for Us

Easely is a harness for the mind. You can explore its benefits for your software development workflow as well. It’s available for JetBrains IDEs and there’s documentation available to help you get started.

I would love to hear from you and what you think about it! I take feedback at, and offer support from, contact@amplifyhuman.ca as well as Bluesky.

See you around!