Posts on c o m p a r t m e n t a l i z a t i o n

Off Switch

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700

You’re reading a post, an email, a doc — and then you hit it:

"It's not just a tool. It's a paradigm shift."

Your brain switches off. You felt it. Something about that sentence registered something as all-too-familiar. You stopped internalizing the idea and instead focused myopically on the construction. The writer lost you because you hit the intellectual off switch.

That construction has a name: negative parallelism. “Not X, but Y.” “Less about A, more about B.” “It isn’t the thing — it’s the other thing.” It shows up in a hundred variations, and every one of them triggers the same AI slop mental block: I want to connect with this idea but it smells like AI… and it should be simpler.

Unfolding... Urgently

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0700

According to a recent Stack Overflow report, a significant percentage of engineers have not adopted AI coding tools. Barely 50% riding faster horses, less than 20% riding in Waymos. Forget about agentic building, they haven’t even adopted AI coding.

The unfolding of capabilities has been incredible. We’ve evolved from copy paste (ChatGPT) to writing each line of code faster (GitHub Copilot) to agentic coding (Cursor) to agentic building (Claude Code). However, there’s a dichotomy at play throughout the unfolding of agentic building — the pace has been both incredibly fast and yet gradual. So slow in fact, that for an engineer not to have adopted agentic building practices borders on negligence.