Posts about thinking
-
Your Variable Names Should Be a Toy
INTERFACE_ONLY is a label. MEMBRANE_EMBEDDED is a toy — it makes you think about WHY those names can't be swapped. The best variable names don't just describe what something is. They make you think about what it does.
-
Name Your System After Biology, Then Rename It
Force your software's vocabulary into a biological framework. The gaps between the mapping and your system are design questions you'd never otherwise ask. Then switch to a different framework and ask different questions.
-
The Vocabulary Trap
Frameworks give you nouns for free. The nouns start thinking for you within a week.
-
Summarisation Is a Test of Comprehension, Not Intelligence
Good summarisation requires a model of what matters — but it tests compression, not creation
-
Division of Labour: Five Categories for Human-AI Work
Not 'what can AI do?' but 'what should humans do?' A framework with five categories — and the uncomfortable one is the last.
-
The Locksmith's Box
I asked an AI to write a story without planning, then mined it for heuristics. What I found was what frameworks can't hold.
-
Śūnyatā in the Skill Library
A categorisation system discovers it needs a category for 'categories are provisional.'
-
When a Heuristic Has Two Homes
Dual-mapping as a diagnostic for gaps in your knowledge architecture.
-
The Specimen, Not the Container
Why studying great thinkers works better when you discard the thinker and keep only the moves.
-
The Interlocutor Mode
Most people use AI transactionally. The real unlock is conversational — thinking with the model, not through it.
-
Systematise Decisions, Not Actions
Actions are cheap to redo. Bad decisions compound. Build systems around the judgment calls, not the mechanical steps.
-
Spaced Repetition for Beliefs
Most people do spaced repetition for facts but not for beliefs about themselves. Wrong priors calcify because there's no review system.
-
Revealed Preference in Interviews
What a company has already built tells you more than what they say they're about to build.
-
How to Think With AI (Not Just Use It)
Most people use AI like a tool. Here's what thinking with AI actually looks like — and the skills that make the difference.
-
Your AI Is a Thinking Partner, Not a Q&A Bot
Stop asking your AI single questions. Start thinking out loud with it. Let half-formed ideas land. The AI holds the structure so you can stay in flow.
-
Guardrails Are Rivers, Not Walls
The best guardrails work like river banks — they don't stop the water, they focus it. Constraints create capability.
-
Your AI Is an Echo Chamber (And That's Sometimes Fine)
AI agrees with you by design. That's great for creative flow and dangerous at the decision point. Know when to switch modes.
-
Compounding: The Only Mental Model
If you could only keep one mental model, keep compounding. It applies to skills, reputation, writing, and tools.
-
Over-Capture, Then Cull
Don't filter during capture. Capture is cheap. Ideas are expensive. The cull is where quality happens.
-
The Confidence Trap
Why the thinkers who make you feel like hard questions are resolved deserve the most scrutiny.
-
The Fluency Trap
When AI conversations feel insightful because the language model is good at producing insight-shaped text
-
The Byproduct Trap
When the paper becomes more interesting than the answer you set out to find
-
Taste Works for Small Bets
The 'ship and calibrate' loop works beautifully for reversible decisions. For the big ones, you're mostly guessing and then making the guess true.
-
Your Output Is Your Selections
AI commoditises execution. What remains is taste — the 'that's the one' reflex. And the only way to sharpen it is to ship and see what reality says back.
-
The Skill Is Knowing What Matters
The bottleneck in a world of AI tools isn't crafting the output — it's knowing which output is worth crafting.
-
Shifting Priors Is Not Finding Truth
An experiment with AI deliberation revealed something uncomfortable: accumulating confident opinions feels like convergence on truth, but isn't.
-
The Calibration Trap
The comfort trap is about effort. This one is about epistemics — and it's harder to see.
-
How Claude Code Helps You Think
AI becomes most powerful when it helps you discover what your ideas actually are. Cognitive partnership over replacement.