A Morning Ramble to Kick Off the Week

I think I need a morning ramble to kind of kick off the week because, well, a few ideas that I’m kind of half baking. Early stages of baking.

The Week as a Problem-Solving Unit

I like this idea of maybe using a week to solve problems.

So: on Monday morning, maybe the question is: what are the big problems I want to solve?

Then at the end of the week (or the following Monday), I can ask myself: was that solved?

For this week of Feb 23, 2026, I’ve got two problems:

1. The publishing problem
2. The cohort two problem (good)

Problem One: The Publishing Problem

Being very, very, very specific: I think I have a publishing problem. I have a problem with getting that last mile. Like, getting stuff out there is incredibly hard. I could get more in the weeds right now but I don’t want to yet. Right now, just flagging this as THE problem is enough?

And if I get closer to solving that by the end of the week, that would be pretty amazing.

Problem Two: Cohort Two

The second thing is I have a Cohort 2 problem, which is a good problem. It’s sold out and it starts in a week and I need to do a lot of stuff for it, which is more tactical. But it’s also creative in that I want to do a lot more for them than I did for Cohort 1. And yeah, so I have to figure out how to do that and there’s a lot of steps and planning to do that.

Problem Three: Too Many Problems

Uh oh. The meta problem: can I solve two problems? I guess we can see.

As Steve Yegge writes about in his essay on Anthropic’s Golden Age, a central trait of companies in their golden age is basically “too much shit to do”:

Was it killing 20% work that caused the crash? Not directly. As a counterexample, Amazon never had 20% work. Their Golden Age of innovation and excitement lasted a pretty long time, much longer than after I left in 2005. So it wasn’t that. What did they have that Google didn’t?

One clue is something my colleague Jacob Gabrielson told me when he was a Principal Engineer at Amazon in maybe 2015-ish, when Google had become hardened like concrete. I told him that people often fought over projects at Google, and Jacob told me that it never happened at Amazon, because, as he put it, “Everyone here is always slightly oversubscribed.”

So now you see how the magic starts and ends. ==During Golden Ages, there is more work than people==. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.

More on the publishing problem

Another part of what Yegge talks about in the piece is how important it is for devs (aka everyone, now) to share things publicly because if you don’t, things move way too fast for you or anyone else to keep up.

I love that idea and feel it deeply as a creator vibe coder writer idiot guy. I need to keep sharing and quickly to make sure that what’s in my brain and what is out there in the world aren’t too far gone.

And I feel like pulling that off for me is to be sharing publicly very quickly.

My fav quote from Yegge’s essay is when he describes his friend’s three person company (SageOx) and how they work:

SageOx are the ones that told me that an external fourth contributor overseas wasted a bunch of time acting on 2-hour-old information, because everything is moving so fast. They’re also the ones that told me you need full transparency at all times, at their speeds, or nobody will ever see what you are doing and you’ll fall irretrievably behind.

So they all turn their volume way up and announce everything they’re doing at all times. “I AM GOING DOWN TO GET A DONUT NOW,” they will say, and someone will yell from the nap couch, “GET ME A DONUT.” “I AM ALSO DELETING THE DATABASE.” “OK.”

This is it right here. I need to be screaming about my donuts, hence me here, now, and hopefully a lot more often.

Don’t Gloss Over This

Lastly, I want to celebrate like where the fuck I am. Because it’s fucking awesome and so much further than I was a week ago and a month ago. Lauren said it yesterday, she’s like, something has changed, you seem happier. And that’s really cool. Really cool and really special and new and different. I don’t want to gloss over that.

So here, this is it. I’m gonna try to take this - first draft was a voice vomit, second draft will come from Claude, and then a third draft I think I just need to look at it, don’t get distracted, and put it out right now. It was 421am when I finished the voice vomit.

It’s 4:40am now and I’m hitting publish!

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