Bits and Bobs 2/23/2026

Model × Scaffolding × Context

  • Model × Scaffolding × Context
    • Success in AI = quality of model * quality of prompting and how you scaffold it * quality of context and what it has access to.
    • The first is increasingly a commodity. The frontier shifts week to week, but everyone is pulling from roughly the same shelf of options.
    • The leverage is in the other two.
    • Scaffolding is how the system thinks with the model, not how the model thinks on its own.
    • Context is what the system can reliably know and do, not what it can guess.

Cognitive debt is the rate-limiting step

  • Cognitive debt is the rate-limiting step
    • AI lets you do more. But your brain still has to hold more.
    • As output scales, so does fragmentation. More threads. More agents. More parallel work. More surface area.
    • This is cognitive debt.
    • I don't think the 1-person billion dollar company will ever really exist for this reason – you need multiple people holding lots of parallel processes and you need to distribute that cognitive load.

Everyone is generously pretending

  • Everyone is generously pretending
    • Realizing that we are all genuine pretenders is freeing.
    • "to realize that we are genuine pretenders opens up a critical awareness of our contingencies. it eases identity." – Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi by Hans-Georg Moeller & Paul J. D'Ambrosio.

I'm pro-presence, not anti-remote.

  • I'm pro-presence, not anti-remote.
    • I'm not anti-remote days. We're all human. Sometimes we get sick. Sometimes we have to pick up kids or run an errand in the middle of the day. And sometimes heads-down work from home is exactly what's needed.
    • It's more that I am deeply pro-presence. In-person is where the magic happens.