02 / Field Notes
Things the work taught me.
The builds keep teaching me things I did not go looking for. These are the ideas that survived contact with the build.
The screen is not where finished things come from.
What changed when my children stopped asking what they could play and started asking what they could make.
002Build enough things to see the patterns.
I can make almost any idea sound coherent in a document. Software is less polite. Building shows me which parts of an idea are actually true.
003A model forgets what it drew one image ago.
Ask for the same rider twice and you get back a cousin. The fix became a rule about where variation gets to live in a system.
004Memory should survive the model.
The useful thing is continuity that remains yours when the model, vendor, or interface changes.
005I took away my smartest AI on purpose.
If the smartest model in the chair disappeared tomorrow, how much of what I built would still stand? The answer changes how you build everything.
006Research first, then compress it into the system.
Before the arcade got built I broke down how the winners do it. Then I compressed what I learned into playbooks the next build actually reads.
Field note rule
Publish after the discovery.
The note is allowed to be small. It just has to contain something the work made clearer than it was before.