What Year One Taught Me I Was Wrong About

A year of daily writing has a way of exposing your own assumptions. Some of mine did not survive. Worth writing down so I do not quietly pick them back up.

The business problem is simple. Assumptions that feel like first principles often are not. They are habits in a trench coat. Testing them in public is the only reliable way to find out which is which.

Wrong assumption one: More tools equals more leverage

On day one I believed a bigger toolbox was better. By month six I realized every tool comes with a maintenance cost. A smaller, sharper toolbox beat the bloated one every time.

Correction: leverage comes from tools that remove decisions, not from having more tools.

Wrong assumption two: Writing public posts needs deep research

I thought every article had to be exhaustively researched. I ran out of depth by month two. Then I realized honest field reports were more useful than surveys. Readers wanted to know what happened in my engagements, not what Gartner was saying.

Correction: ship what happened this week. Depth can come later.

Wrong assumption three: Agents would replace hand-rolled scripts

In month one I thought agent frameworks were the future of automation. Twelve months later I ship more plain Python scripts than ever. The scripts are smarter because of LLMs. They are not agents.

Correction: agents are for tasks with branching decisions. Scripts are for tasks without them. Most tasks are the second kind.

How I caught each one

Tools: a client asked why I used five different task runners. I had no answer.
Writing: an article I wrote in an hour outperformed one I wrote in ten.
Agents: a junior dev on a client team shipped with scripts in a weekend what I had spent a month on with an agent framework.

The habit

Every quarter I write down the three assumptions I am most sure about. I keep them visible. At the end of the quarter I check which survived.

See Julia Galef on scout mindset for the mental model I am trying to practice. Being wrong in public is the cheapest tuition in this field.