I’m thinking that one special trait of Jon is that he doesn’t back down from hard problems. But if I don’t back down from hard problems, that obviously doesn’t mean I’ll be good as him; furthermore, there’s a huge amount of programmers shooting themselves in the foot by saying “too hard, can’t do that,” and so they never even enter the arena from where they can improve their ability and at least be competing in the same arena as Jon. They never even tried. So that’s something for me to take on: don’t shoot myself in the foot, work through hard problems, and improve at my craft. It sounds obvious, but I don’t see very many people being dutiful in this way (perhaps I should surround myself with more people like that).
It's not a viable approach for a programming language that has almost no public code. I think Jon also does not work with lots of third party APIs, doesn't copy paste macros or do other things that LLMs are good at.
