I think of hitting publish as throwing another draft into the world. With luck, it resonates with a few folks out in the world and that teaches me something the mental models of Internet Readers. Most often, it flitters off into the aether and I try to say the thing again better, later.

So here we are: later.

“And in that moment, Bob realized that sending a message to Alice was, indeed, a bad decision.” Little meta-syntactic fictions, who’s on board?

LLMs: they're weird computers. And, maybe slot machines. “This is a weird form of metaprogramming: we write “code” in the form of prompts that execute on the LLM to produce the actual code that runs on real CPUs.” I wish I’d written that bit, but at least I’m here to quote it.

“Eat trash, be free”, ain’t that the (situationally correct) wisdom of the times?

Modern applications can’t hope to escape towering chains of complexity. Careful consideration of trade-offs and a bit of gardening are the way through. "If you don’t read, you won’t succeed.” Possibly the best one-liner advice on managing dependencies out there. You might as well get good at understanding and mitigating the carried complexity.

If, after adopting coding agents, teams are (still) afraid to slip a deadline, accidentally ship a bug, or cause an unforeseen performance issue, there’s still a problem. All the LLMs and coding agents in the world won’t fix it for you.

Leadership is “don’t be spooky” down, “no surprises” up. (I’m not sure I can make that one any snappier.)

When a project goes sideways, because your estimates were wrong or surprises did their thing, don’t try to recover by going faster or catching better luck.

The best estimates I’ve given weren’t the most accurate. They were the ones that helped teams navigate uncertainty instead of pretending it away.

Feel, fast, function, form.In that order, every time.

It ships because it's time:thirty is a pretty good starter constraint. Scheduling (a queue) of drafts makes this more sustainable and generates a little margin for one review before a newsletter or post goes out to the world.

Reading is always better outside, if you have the means. I’m still solving for making this happen in the fall and winter though.

At my best, I consider that all the drafts could be collected, organized, reconsidered, and remixed into a higher-order journal of ideas and thinking. So here I am, rewriting a couple months of links and headlines to better think what I previously thought.

You can’t write about the same river twice. You can’t code the same river simulation twice. You can’t toot the same tweet twice.

But you can rewrite about the river, code, or idea and get something out of it. Given the passage of time, it’s an insightful activity.

Rethinking your good ideas: I recommend it!