Systems

The Observation I was thinking this morning about friction in technology, and how a good customer will leave without a word. A little is useful. Too much, and they just give up. The local coffee shop is a franchise I go to all the time. A few months ago they released a new mobile app to replace the old one. The new one has latency problems. Flaky at best, worse around 8 in the morning, less bad mid-morning. A colleague and I were talking about it in the office. We wondered if the app is silently failing and they don’t even realize they’re hitting a bandwidth wall at the rush. ...

The Observation I was explaining how I take notes to someone on a call. I didn’t start them on my whole digital system. I handed them a pack of habits that fit on an index card. Front: date, plus the idea that stopped them. Back: source, and why it mattered. One idea only. A highlight, a short conversation snippet, a Bible verse, a few sentences that can stand alone. Not a chapter dump. Not a book summary. Not a sticky note you’ll never find again. ...

Today I rebuilt the routing rules for my AI agents: which model handles mechanical work, which handles hard reasoning, which validates the output before I see it. The setup looked rigorous. Every substantial piece of work got checked by a validator agent running at high effort on my most capable model. The critique that stopped me: the validator was the same model as the thing it was checking. Same model, same characteristic errors. When the producer and the checker share a mind, the check confirms the work is consistent with itself. It can’t see the errors that mind is inclined to make, because it’s inclined to make them too. ...

I was listening to a podcast episode of No Priors recently where Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said something that stopped me. Customer support, he argued, exists because we build bad products. If we build great products, why would we have to have customer support? It’s too complicated, it’s hard to onboard, it’s got too many dials. That’s why it takes so much time to make, and eventually it’s not efficient. ...