A bad line of code is... a bad line of code. But a bad line of a **plan** could lead to hundreds of bad lines of code. And a bad line of **research**, a misunderstanding of how the codebase works or where certain functionality is located, could land you with thousands of bad lines of code.

Our ancestors shared knowledge, solved problems, and preserved cultural memory through spoken words. Speaking wasn't separate from thinking. It *was* thinking.

Intellectual rigor comes from the journey: the dead ends, the uncertainty, and the internal debate. Skip that, and you might still get the insight--but you'll have lost the infrastructure for meaningful understanding. Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for your mind comes from building the output yourself.

Feedback is a gift because it's always much easier to simply not give it, especially if it would be unflattering. So, if someone shares constructive feedback with you, remember it would've been easier for them to say nothing. Keep this in mind if your instinct is to react defensively.

Having good forcing functions to keep your iterations small, using feature flags, and shipping daily. If you do that consistently, no one will ask, *"How much will it take to build X?"*. They know you'll ship the first version soon because you deliver small chunks, measure, and improve. No great engineer wants to wait hours for their build to finish and two days before their code can reach production.

An architecture that scales well for a particular application is built around assumptions of which operations will be common and which will be rare -- the load parameters.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. -- C.A.R. Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture

I don't think AI introduces a new kind of thinking. *It reveals what actually requires thinking*.