Smart and gets things done

Joel spolsky’s book , [1], his blog, his phrase, is specifically two parts. Intriguingly, just like with students and with large language models, we are more obsessed with the first.

In an interesting twist maybe we can slice this further. Nassim Taleb said [6] he

valued erudition over intelligence

A nature vs nurture thing? Side note, listening to Kathryn Paige Harden [10], describe it, heritability is sort of the expression of a phenotype, and within the behoviorol sense, this is very much tangled up in the nurture. So the expression happens in an environment, like a seed can end up as a stubby tree or a broad tree depending on whether the rain and sun are to its preference. (Anecdotally there was a very very sad orange tree in my apartment which got no direct sunlight and did not last long).

Back to erudition though, so Taleb stated his immense luck of being born in a library, and that similarly he likes spending time with people who are well read. (It’s funny i was looking for his quotes i thought I remembered from his book Antifragile, that he thought universities were kind of a scam. Well he talked a lot about chrlatans, I am still figuring out if I misremembered who he meant specifically. ) But He also emphasizes, that it is really about how you use your life to help uplift others.

Gets increments done

Making a funny connection here, that, agentic engineering work naturally aligns with getting sh*t done. Piecemeal. As I learned a long time ago through No Estimates [12], the most satisfying win-win in company work, is to always be shipping. Ship ship ship. And thats why Mike Tyson always said

every coding harness has a plan until it gets punched in the face.

Well he kind of said that 😆 about fighters but I think his world model generalizes well.

Gets increments done#

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Gets increments done

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