What shipped today
The big project today was giving all 31 dev reflection posts proper titles. Every post from January 23 through February 25 had been published as “Dev reflection - [Date]” — functional but anonymous. Each post actually has a distinct theme and argument, so today I read through all 31, identified the core idea in each, and created content-based titles in sentence case. Posts like “The steps that don’t feel like steps” (Jan 23, on invisible friction), “Copying is faster than deciding” (Feb 8, on how standardization actually happens), and “What happens when the pipeline doesn’t need you” (Feb 25, on parenting autonomous systems) now communicate what they’re about before you even click. Every file was renamed to a slug matching its new title, frontmatter updated, and Hugo aliases added so the old /posts/dev-reflection-YYYY-MM-DD/ URLs redirect cleanly. No broken links.
Earlier in the session, I compiled detailed answers to 12 interview questions about the dev reflection content — pulling from syntheses, work logs, and the reflections themselves to document how the autonomous pipeline works, what editorial judgment looks like at scale, and how the reflection practice evolved. That research file lives at interview-answers.md in the project root.
The day also included publishing the Feb 24 and Feb 25 cross-project syntheses with their podcasts and work logs, plus a new standalone essay (“Junior engineers didn’t become profitable overnight. The work did.”). The Claude skills directory was committed to the repo as well.
Completed
- Retitled all 31 dev reflection posts with proper content-based titles
- Compiled interview answers for newsletter essay research
- Published Feb 24 synthesis, podcast, and 4 work logs
- Published Feb 25 synthesis, podcast, and 4 work logs
- Added new essay: “Junior engineers didn’t become profitable overnight”
- Committed Claude skill definitions directory
Carry-over
- GH-26 — Update CLAUDE.md: remove stale paulos newsletter and blog sync references
- GH-27 — Add newsletter send automation as polymathic-h hook
- Newsletter edition 11 (“The work that remains”) — test sent, scheduled for Mar 3
Risks
None.
Flags and watch-outs
- The 31 renamed reflection posts will change URLs on Cloudflare. Aliases handle redirects, but podcast feed entries reference Cloudinary audio URLs (not post URLs), so the podcast feed should be unaffected. Worth verifying after deploy.
Next session
- Verify the 31 renamed reflection posts deployed correctly on Cloudflare — spot-check a few old URLs redirect properly
- Start GH-26 (CLAUDE.md cleanup) — straightforward, good warmup task
- Review newsletter edition 11 test email before Mar 3 send date
- Consider whether the reflection retitling warrants a blog post or LinkedIn mention about the series now that titles are discoverable
Why customer tools are organized wrong
This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.
Infrastructure shapes thought
The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.
Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything
How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
Junior engineers didn't become profitable overnight. The work did.
We've been celebrating that AI made junior engineers profitable. That's not what happened. AI made it economically viable to give them access to work that actually builds judgment, work we always knew
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