Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 1287 answers
Weight your criteria and score options systematically when multiple factors matter.
For every important process have a documented way to recover from common failures.
An agent that fires when it shouldn't wastes your attention and erodes trust.
Dedicate focused time blocks to optimizing specific agents rather than trying to optimize everything continuously.
When retiring an agent ensure its responsibilities transfer to a new agent or are consciously dropped.
Every agent needs a clear definition of what success looks like in measurable terms. Without operational metrics, monitoring produces noise instead of signal.
Measure things that predict outcomes rather than waiting for outcomes themselves.
Small uncorrected errors can trigger chains of increasingly large errors.
An agent that fires when it shouldn't wastes your attention and erodes trust.
An agent that fires when it shouldn't wastes your attention and erodes trust.
Change one thing at a time so you can attribute improvements to specific changes.
Focusing on who caused an error prevents understanding why it happened.
Resistance to certain feedback signals it touches an important blind spot.
Reviewing what happened after completing a task surfaces errors for future correction.
An efficient agent achieves results with minimal energy expenditure — cognitive, emotional, or physical.
An efficient agent achieves results with minimal energy expenditure — cognitive, emotional, or physical.
Sometimes you should improve an existing agent; sometimes you should replace it entirely.
Define clear criteria for when an agent should be retired rather than maintained. Without explicit retirement criteria set in advance, you will hold onto agents long past the point where they serve you — because the sunk cost of building them, the identity you attached to them, and the absence of.
For most decisions good enough is better than perfect because the search cost exceeds the improvement.
Your emotions create self-reinforcing cycles — anxiety begets more anxiety.
When retiring an agent ensure its responsibilities transfer to a new agent or are consciously dropped.
Using specific emotional states as activation signals for pre-designed responses.
Design your systems to fail partially rather than completely.
Design your systems to fail partially rather than completely.