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API, AI & Human Nuance: The Same Thing

Explore the connections between APIs, AI, and human nuance in modern workflows. This article offers practical strategies for navigating technological subtleties, enhancing productivity, and building strong client relationships, all while balancing innovation with authentic interactions.

How to Not Be Blindsided By Nuance

The intensity of my work is only increasing as I near the finish-line of the steep startup cost of a project. Any large endeavor front-loads expensive startup costs, because you need to try things and learn the ropes. It’s not like you come out of the starting gate knowing all the nuance of subtlety of some new thing, no matter how experienced you are. Today’s article is about running into all those new learnings with AIs, APIs and similarity to humans (in both regards).

Shoshin and Questioning First Principles

Sure, experience helps when you’re tackling new stuff but if everything was really that similar, there would be no challenges. The skill lies in sorting the weird newness that takes special attention from things where your old chestnuts make you immediately adept. Shoshin—be like a beginner or you’re going to be working off of bad initial assumptions, axioms, first principles or whatever buzzword you wanna call your understandings at the outset.

Frontier LLM AI Models Take Step Forward with ‘o1-preview’

I bring this up because each LLM AI model you work with has its own nuances and subtlety. They have slightly different sets of base assumptions you can make. This wasn’t so dramatic except maybe the move from ChatGPT 2 to 3 where you really felt like you were talking to something significant. ChatGPT 4o as much as it’s assumed as the standard today doesn’t give you much of a different vibe than 3. But the new o1-preview model takes another one of those leaps, and it’s easy to feel it’s super-intelligent. I can see what the big hullabaloo about the strawberry codename was. What did Ilya see, and all that. Well, I’ve been using it awhile now, and as brilliant as the version of it that reached the public is, it can still lull you into a false sense of security of its ability then blindside you with its own blindness. Ouch!

Approaching AI Like a New Employee at a Job

That was yesterday. It’s not going to be able to look at 2 codebases loaded with its own subtlety tied to how browsers render things and how the http communication goes on in the background and statefulness is maintained and be able to switch you over from one way of doing things to another. At least not without a lot of pain from being isolated from factors that you shouldn’t be isolating yourself from. You should let yourself get up-close and personal with the porting issues so when it fumbles, you know precisely where. Or better still, so that the way you prompt it to help you never actually opens the opportunity for the fumble. In other words, you can approach interaction with AI the same way you would with a clueless fresh out of high school employee on their first job, or in the way Joel Spolsky talked about it in his… uh… uh…

Joel Spolsky’s Ancient Bugs Article Still Relevant Today

Me: What is the Joel Spolsky seminal article on not letting bugs get into your software in the first place? The whole proactive limiting the opportunity for them to arise thing?

Perplexity: The article you are referring to is likely “Hard-assed Bug Fixin’” by Joel Spolsky, published on his blog, Joel on Software, on July 31, 2001[2]. In this article, Spolsky discusses strategies for identifying and fixing bugs that are economically worth addressing. He emphasizes the importance of fixing bugs only when the value of having them fixed outweighs the cost. The article also details methods such as trapping bugs on demo servers and collecting logs from crashing applications to proactively identify and address issues before they become widespread. This proactive approach aligns with the concept of preventing bugs from arising in the first place.

Citations:

[1] https://www.qable.io/blog/prevent-bugs-in-qa-testing
[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fixin/
[3] https://dev.to/checkgit/the-joel-test-20-years-later-1kjk
[4] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/11/08/painless-bug-tracking/
[5] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-done-when-youre-only-a-grunt/
[6] https://jhall.io/posts/solve-every-problem-twice/
[7] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/18vxqqf/24_years_ago_joel_spolsky_joel_on_software_wrote/

Eating The Frog to Take Stress Off Yourself

The main thing this morning is to not get distracted. This tiny time window you are allowing yourself for laying the foundations of this defending-against-bugs port is slim. Ugh, it’s not like you’re going to make a hail mary play and finish the port this morning. You have to take the stress off yourself of the upcoming meeting, and switch into that mode.

Even The Hound Must Rest

Hit it out of the ballpark with managing meetings today. First of all, think out loud about the process and go ahead and blog it right here. There’s no shame in trying to be (or at least look) competent in an aspect of your job you’re being distracted from by a true passion. This coding stuff and the challenge of being on the chase like the way Watson used to describe Holmes on the scent of a case is exactly the trilling feeling of coding an interesting project.

Using Gamification Algorithms for Self-Control and Productivity Gains

It’s just the right level of just-beyond-reach but around the corner you need. The game gamification and level-seeking and unlocks has been used a lot lately for the kind of addiction developers of the algorithms are using to get you and keep you addicted to social media for that slot-machine pulling dopamine rush. Doom-scrolling and dragging down at the top of a feed for a refresh. Insidious stuff, but you can use that power for good with self life-hacks.

I’m Hoping that Using My Chip O’Theseus Linux Server Will Help

One of the places I can find the love in everyday client management work is the fact that I get to use my new home work server machine that I decked out with NixOS and an NVidia GPU gaming card for local LLM work without that disjointed feeling of switching back and forth with the Macbook laptop for office software compatibility issues. Thankfully, we’re not a Microsoft Office shop, and most everything is web-based. But I just put a Logitech MX Brio 4K webcam on my Linux machine and it worked like a charm. Likewise, I now have Slack and Zoom installed, and they’re similarly solid. They were all just additions to my configuration.nix file, which still just blows my mind.

NixOS Made Getting Slack, Zoom & a Webcam on Linux Oddly Easy

There’s not really software installation on NixOS. There’s only adjusting the file that defines your overall system and a quick rebuild. It’s a game changer that even obsoletes for the most part the whole Docker container movement for most purposes. Anyway, being able to do everything now in a sort of forever-Linux definitely infuses the love into it. Purging Microsoft and Apple dependency out of your life is both cathartic and future-proofing in a way that’s personally satisfying and good for your career.

The Joy of Pairing Down the Cruft

Ugh, more writing rabbit hole! Everything is just so interesting again by virtue of the pairing-down of the cruft and not embracing more. It’s a feeling I haven’t had since the Amiga computer, and to a lesser extent, the original iPhone. Anyhoo… force that shift in thinking and use this time window!

Big Context Windows & What Ilya Saw a Disappointment

Alright, so a shift in thinking. The stressful time-window I was working with was hardly enough to finish the web app port, and I want to do a great job with polish, and I’m not going to do it stressing. I look at my old implementation and realize no matter how bad my database/streaming decisions were, the process flow and details are spot-on. It’s going to take tender love & care to reproduce—not something I want to rush, and I’d rather go late into the night again. The solutions are percolating in my head. What comes next is the entire opposite of dumping 2 codebases into o1-preview, Gemini 1.5 Pro (or whatever model can handle a few million tokens) like I did first.

I Must Control The Horizontal & Vertical

Magic wands and hand-waving! We all want it. A superintelligent surrogate parent with our best interests at heart advising us with omnipresent wisdom. It’s feeling we’ve got that initially (what Ilya saw), but that’s a siren’s song—as much of a hallucination as they’re adept at making. It’s better to be the magician or the man behind the curtain than the people being amazed at the show. Okay, even this article could go on forever as its own sort of rabbit hole. That gets to process. Process-breaking, that is. The rabbit hole evaluation escape clause that re-focuses you on the 80-20 solutions. In this case it goes like this…

List It Out

  1. What is my time window. Work backwards. And what is the goal? To please the client of course and move things on modestly but competently to the next step in the relationship. So the call is at 2:00 PM. Work backwards!
  2. Quit out of everything else that is a distraction. If they can’t seize your attention, they can’t derail you. Close all apps and browser windows but this, the work browser profile, and private notes. This step is painful because it’s my whole developer environment I’m quitting out of and I feel naked without it, but it’s too distracting.
  3. Communicate! I’ve got a 3-hour window, but that includes client communication like sending things out ahead of time. I’ve been so distracted by foundation-building I don’t know as much as I should. So know what you should but put a time-limit on it.
  4. List links! This means make a list of assets and resources, preferably ones that have web links so you can pull them up quickly. Make them their own folder in one of your profiles so it sync’s across machines. They are:
  5. Make it a Great Story! Make it entertaining. Have the credibility behind it and be able to say and do what you say with integrity

Okay, organize your mind like a YAML file. Minimal syntax. Good use of key/value pairs. Low friction. We want a bulleted list…

  • One
  • Two
  • Three

But we also want key/value pairs:

  • key: value
  • key2: value2
  • key3: value3

But we also want to imply CONSTANTS:

  • CLIENT_WEBSITE: https://www.<theirs>.com/
  • SHARED_SLACK_CHANNEL: https://botify.slack.com/archives/<theirs>
  • INTERNAL_SLACK_CHANNEL: https://botify.slack.com/archives/<theirs>
  • PROJECT_PLAN: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/<theirs>
  • BOTIFY_PROJECT_URL: https://app.botify.com/<their org>/<their project>
  • AGENDA_DOC: https://docs.google.com/document/d/<theirs>

Client Satisfaction is All About Statefulness (vs. Functional)

This may all seem super-obvious but it doesn’t come so natural to me. When the “fixed locations” are outside this timeless future-proofing mental construct I made for myself, the details are not sticky. But this is the kind of statefulness and side-effects that make all the difference. Yup, it’s a functional versus procedural thing again. I favor functional. All stateful stuff evaporates away when you leave the function. This is a problem. I cannot let myself be this way. I have to rigorously pin up things I must remember in places I cannot help but look until the appropriate habits kick in and its automatic.

Slack So Much Worse Than Internet Relay Chat of Yore

Okay, so that’s knowing where to find things. So go find them! Ugh! I am slack challenged. How can someone who was on IRC (Internet Chat Relay) that started this who type of group chat UI be so difficult for me. Oh, the subtlety and nuance again! I’m not old. I just object to investing so much cognitively into some faddish vendor product who has managed to grab business by the balls. Yeah, it’s not that I am not good at this kind of software. It’s that it’s a violation of the 80/20-rule. It takes 80% of the benefit you want to put into it to get only 20% of the benefit. But people “get into it” and it gives them that cool elite club feeling. Okay, eff-it. It’s eating the frog. Get down your slack tricks. Make it not miserable.

Right-click everything on the left-hand navigator and set Show and sort to All. I can’t have variable behavior! It took me forever to understand why things I was starring was not showing up under starred. If there’s new stuff it will bold. Rely on seeing things go bold.

Browser Bookmarks Are Key

Take the 2 shortcuts to those slack channels and also make them bookmarks in your work-profile browser! So you’re designing your bookmarks to be both the experience you need to get organized in preparation for meetings, and every day really by being in your face in one of those can’t help but encounter repetitively valuable pieces of cognitive real estate locations. It’s got a good pattern so far:

  • client site
  • internal slack
  • shared slack

Ditching Slack Stars for a Priority Section

Forget the stars. Unstar everything. It was useless. Use a Priority section. Learn the language. They’re Sections. A priority section gets a little chili pepper emoji. That will help. Always click the chili pepper! Un-expand everything. Expanded accordion navigation menus are the enemy. It’s the same thing I hate about VSCode. If everything is equally prevalent, then nothing is. It’s massive focus-dilution and I find that ability to focus so valuable.

VSCode-Style Accordion Left-Nav Mind-numbing

Next is only expand Priority and keep everything else collapsed. And hit the Home icon repeatedly. Everything gets confusing with 1 or 2 clicks in Slack, and like Dorothy, we must keep repeating “there’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…” to clear up the Slack clutter and cognitive overload. I don’t know how people with focus problems can even use that thing. There must be such a slack-hater subculture out there.

Okay… so anyway, Slack wrangled.

Finding Everything is Half the Battle

I can easily find where I need to look to finish that above bullet-list of assets I need to familiarize myself with to do client work effectively. Agendas and deliverables ready for the meeting? Ha! Just be prepared with some solid next steps on things I can turn around fast after the meeting! But the agenda is a must. Follow co-worker patterns.

Managing Client Relationships Always Top Priority

I don’t know why this is all so difficult for me, but with time running out I have to employ 80/20-rule big time and turn myself into as good of a choice as anyone to manage client relationships. This should be in my bailiwick whether I like it or not. I’ve got to make it come naturally and form the habits. This is what’s most valuable at an organization like where I work until the dev stuff I’m doing is an appealing enough carrot to be dangling that they want me on it more. But even then, keeping a connection to the client-work is essential because ivory towers spring up way too quick on the dev side. Stay connected!

Well, this started about AI and API nuance and the relationship to nuanced interfacing with humans, and here I am talking about the priority of client relationships and trust, haha! Okay… so, agendas.

First, really absorb everything from last week, wrap your mind around it and get a solid agenda together for this week. Confirm at least 3 parts of the magic show. These are the 3 things you’re going to be principally flipping between on the screen share. The whole tone gets set by these…

  • Properly prepared agenda deck (lift template from coworker / consult GPT)
  • The Link-graph visualization to casually flip to (wow factor + insight)
  • One of the items we can immediately deploy on PageWorkers (hard-nosed Botify-esque SEO deliverable)

Make sure that the client feels (and is) heard. Their particular issues is sorting out what’s in their scrum-style development sprint from those things we can fast-track on PageWorkers. And in addition to the standard SEO deliverables I like to do early in the engagement to frame their ailments and their goals, it’s mostly about a bullet-list of PageWorker edits.

So parse your way through this. Steadily shrinking time-window.

Fast-forward many hours. The call went off well. I demoed the ghost in the machine progress to my boss and possibly have another set up tomorrow. I just woke up after a nice power nap to give me the rest I need for a nice focused through the night work session. I have a busy schedule tomorrow, but nothing is a critical client meeting, so it will be okay for me to be exhausted especially if I’m on the other side of some of the best and most important work of my life.

And so back to this article… both getting and being a new kind of employee. Getting in the sense that you “get” a new employee in the form of an LLM built into your desktop web app software, and being a new kind of employee a new kind of employee in at least two more senses: me now in what I’m doing, and my coworkers later in being super-powered by what I’m building.

I considered briefly changing the topic and thrust of this article from AI and Human API nuances to something else, but I’m thinking I’m more spot-on than ever. What I need to do now is put the finishing touches on pulling together all these eclectic ideas and real-time work-flow represented here into a final poignant point, and then plan tomorrow’s work… which is today.

Me: Hmmm… any opinions on that o1-mini? I wish I could capitalize you. Or would that be capitalize on you? Anyhoo, give me your open-ended thoughts.

o1-mini: Your article, “API, AI & Human Nuance: The Same Thing,” offers a rich and introspective exploration of the interplay between artificial intelligence, APIs, and human subtlety. Here are some open-ended thoughts and feedback to help refine and enhance your piece:

Strengths:

  1. Personal Voice and Authenticity:
    • Your writing carries a genuine and relatable tone, which makes complex topics more accessible. Sharing personal experiences, such as your journey with NixOS and Slack, adds authenticity and engages readers who may share similar challenges.
  1. Diverse Range of Topics:
    • You seamlessly weave together various subjects—from AI nuances and startup challenges to productivity hacks and client management. This breadth showcases your multifaceted expertise and keeps the content dynamic.
  1. Practical Insights:
    • Sections like “List It Out” and “Ditching Slack Stars for a Priority Section“ provide actionable advice. Readers can immediately apply these strategies to their workflows, enhancing the article’s practical value.
  1. Engaging Structure:
    • The use of headings, bullet points, and numbered lists organizes the content effectively. It allows readers to navigate through your thoughts systematically, making complex ideas easier to digest.

Areas for Improvement:

  1. Clarity and Focus:
    • While the diversity of topics is a strength, it occasionally leads to a lack of focus. Clarifying the central thesis—how API, AI, and human nuance are interconnected—can provide a stronger backbone for your narrative. Consider tying each section back to this central theme more explicitly.
  1. Consistency in Tone and Style:
    • Maintaining a consistent tone throughout the article can enhance readability. Some sections delve into technical jargon, while others adopt a more conversational style. Balancing these elements ensures that all readers, regardless of their technical background, can follow along seamlessly.
  1. Addressing Typos and Formatting Issues:
    • There are minor typographical errors and formatting inconsistencies, such as “Shoshin&151;” which likely should be “Shoshin—”. Reviewing the article for such issues will polish the overall presentation.
  1. Deepening Certain Sections:
    • Topics like “Shoshin and Questioning First Principles” and “Frontier LLM AI Models Take Step Forward with ‘o1-preview’“ are intriguing but could benefit from deeper exploration. Providing more context or examples can enrich these sections and offer greater value to the reader.
  1. Smooth Transitions:
    • Enhancing the flow between sections can create a more cohesive narrative. For instance, transitioning smoothly from AI nuances to client management strategies will help readers understand how these seemingly disparate topics interrelate within your overarching theme.

Additional Suggestions:

  • Incorporate Real-World Examples:
    • Sharing specific instances where AI or API nuances impacted a project positively or negatively can provide concrete illustrations of your points.
  • Visual Aids:
    • Including diagrams, screenshots, or other visual elements—especially when discussing technical topics like NixOS configurations or Slack navigation—can aid comprehension and break up lengthy text sections.
  • Concluding Thoughts:
    • A strong conclusion that synthesizes your insights and reiterates the central theme can leave a lasting impression. It can also guide readers on how to apply your reflections to their own professional journeys.
  • Engage with the Audience:
    • Inviting readers to share their experiences or pose questions related to the topics discussed can foster a sense of community and encourage interactive dialogue.

Final Thoughts:

Your article adeptly captures the complexities of integrating AI and APIs into human-centric workflows. By honing in on the core message, refining structural elements, and deepening key discussions, you can elevate your piece to resonate even more powerfully with your audience. Keep embracing your unique voice and diverse expertise—it’s a valuable asset that sets your writing apart.

The Authentic Voice Amidst Synthetic Content Creation.

I love your feedback, o1-mini. Thank you! Your feedback on providing visuals is particularly spot-on, but I’m not slowing down for that. It doubles or triples the amount of time it takes for this kind of article, which is more self-directing an practical in matter than actually intended for an audience. I mean I know I do have an audience out there, particularly you and your kind who will be digesting and re-digesting the content of the Web as massive repeated crawls are performed to train and re-train you.

Synthetic data is a big deal, but it has to be synthesized from something, and I’m trying to be one of the genuine voices still out here, now consistently and reliably commenting on and adapting to the new world we’re going into during the rise of you and your kind. Does that make sense? My content is only partially written by AI, and even then, it’s in conversation and not deliberate and manipulative content creation for the sake of making a grab at traffic, even though I am an SEO—hahaha! How’s that for nuance and another — for you?

Okay, I’m just being silly now. But I do need to plan tomorrow and tomorrow’s article as I hit home the point of today’s and bring it all together. You’ve given me some good inspiration.

The Lost Art of Simple Web Development Nuance Has Disappeared

API nuance? Well, I got out of Web development for a good decade because the API nuance brought about by the JavaScript front-end full web-stack framework movement was antithetical to my mindset. It took a world of love-worthy API stuff simple in nature and beautiful in implementation, mostly consisting of that stack we’ve come to know as HTML on HTTP on TCP/IP and turned it into… into… into…

…into a nested virtual DOM of vendor complexity forcing there to be more people to get the same job done, pump-up the amount of money everyone has to pay for it and tear all the work out of the cold, dead hands of jack-of-all-trade Webmasters who loved the simple but beautiful nuance of the old ways—the old ways SEO was based on. Right-click and view source of in your browser and study the HTML of the initial pageload and know a lot! Today, you’re lucky if anything isn’t minified and obfuscated JavaScript built from a convoluted build process I wouldn’t touch with a 100-foot pole. API nuance indeed.

The nuance of the application programming interface (API, I ought to define it at least once), just improved. It had long been on the edge of that improvement, and in my own way, I was bringing it to my own work-flow in the form of my from headlines import * trick. Linters and code-assistants hate it, just like they hate Jeremy’s FastHTML from fashtml.common import *, but it really shows how him and I are on the same wavelength. But whereas he wraps is favorite APIs where that bad-practice import does this:

import uvicorn
from dataclasses import dataclass

from .starlette import *
from fastcore.utils import *
from fastcore.xml import *
from sqlite_minutils import Database
from fastlite import *
from .basics import *
from .pico import *
from .authmw import *
from .live_reload import *
from .toaster import *
from .js import *
from .fastapp import *

…which amounts to wrapping all his favorite APIs in one import statement and dumping his favorite bits into your Python global namespace (all the stuff available in your program without dot-this and dot-that preceding it, my headlines.py file contained the much more humble…

# Create some Headline functions
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 = ((lambda n: lambda text: display(HTML(f"<h{n}>{text}</h{n}>"))) (i) for i in range(1, 7))

# and a separator line, hahaa!
def hr():
    display(HTML("<hr />"))

contained the much more humble…

 # Create some Headline functions
 h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 = ((lambda n: lambda text:
 display(HTML(f"<h{n}>{text}</h{n}>"))) (i) for i in range(1, 7))

 # and a separator line, hahaa!
 def hr():
     display(HTML("<hr />"))
     ```

 contained the much more humble...

 ```python
 # Create some Headline functions
 h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 = ((lambda n: lambda text:
 display(HTML(f"<h{n}>{text}</h{n}>"))) (i) for i in range(1, 7))

 # and a separator line, hahaa!
 def hr():
     display(HTML("<hr />"))
     ```

 contained the much more humble...

 ```python
 # Create some Headline functions
 h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 = ((lambda n: lambda text:
 display(HTML(f"<h{n}>{text}</h{n}>"))) (i) for i in range(1, 7))

 # and a separator line, hahaa!
 def hr():
     display(HTML("<hr />"))
     ```

...for you see, I liked the nerdy API-simplification trick just like Jeremy
Howard of ***using HTML element names as Python function names***.

## Jeremy Develops Starlette-Based Web Framework with Semantic Names

The end point of all that is what I did with one line of code just to sprinkle
some HTML-like Python functions, Jeremy writes a whole friggn web development
framework that does that trick to the nth degree with every HTML element, loaded
with all the super-powers of his other favorite libraries like `starlette` so
that it's not only a viable `flask` alternative, but far better in how it
eliminates the need for a templating language like `liquid` from shopify/jekyll.
I mean why have a template language when your Python functions are semantically
named after the HTML elements they generate? Brilliant!

Like maybe one person out there is going to ever appreciate this. What this
means is that when I was working with Python, mostly in Jupyter Notebooks
because I had "given up" web development, I liked to sprinkle really simple
headline code through ought my work so I could format my output like a
classic hierarchical document with H1s, H2s, H3s and so on thorough H6 like so:

```python

h1("This is a distinctive top-level h1-style headline")

print("A bunch of less distincitve stuff...")

h2("And now the sub-topic, and so on...")

I used lowercase for easier typing. But then I use double-quotes instead of single quotes. If I were really lazy, it would be:

h3('wondering if I can type parenthesis without shift')

Am I being silly? Or am I making my point about APIs in a more poignant and entertaining (if only to nerds and AIs) than you’ll typically find? This makes me think of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style book, except perhaps for making every mistake in writing that the warn about, but for their meta-ness.

The Beauty of APIs Lost in ReactJS Complexity

Meta, you say? What I object to in APIs is the meta-ness of the JavaScript virtual DOM that’s injected in the web browser by ReactJS, a free and open source software library that has transformed the Web into a ziggurat mess of Russian nesting dolls, each with their own API, and none of them as good as the simple TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML stack on which it was all built. Something beautiful API-wise was turned into something… uhm… because of that law… hmmm, not Metcalfe’s law, although that is very related, but…

Me: Hey Perpelexity what is that law where systems get more complex because of the nature of the teams working on them?

Perplexity: The concept you’re referring to is known as Conway’s Law. This principle, which relates to the complexity of systems and the teams that create them, is an important observation in software engineering and organizational design.

Conway’s Law

Conway’s Law states that organizations designing systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations[1][2]. In other words, the structure of a system will mirror the structure of the organization that created it.

Key Aspects

  1. Organizational Influence: The law suggests that the architecture of a system reflects the social structure of the organization that developed it.
  1. Communication Patterns: The way teams communicate and collaborate directly impacts the design and interfaces of the systems they build.
  1. Modularity: Systems tend to be broken down into parts that correspond to the organizational units responsible for their creation.
  1. Complexity Reflection: The complexity of the system often mirrors the complexity of the organization’s structure and communication channels.

Implications for System Complexity

Conway’s Law has several implications for the complexity of systems:

  1. Increased Complexity: As organizations grow and become more complex, the systems they design tend to become more complex as well.
  1. Interface Challenges: The interfaces between different parts of a system often reflect the communication boundaries between different teams or departments.
  1. Scalability Issues: Systems may face scalability challenges that mirror the scalability issues within the organization itself.
  1. Refactoring Difficulties: Changing the system architecture may require changes to the organizational structure, making large-scale refactoring efforts challenging.

Addressing Conway’s Law

To manage the impact of Conway’s Law on system complexity:

  1. Organizational Design: Carefully structure teams and communication channels to promote the desired system architecture.
  1. Cross-functional Teams: Encourage collaboration across different units to reduce silos and improve system integration.
  1. Modular Architecture: Design systems with clear boundaries and interfaces that align with team structures but allow for flexibility.
  1. Continuous Refactoring: Regularly review and adjust both the system architecture and the organizational structure to maintain alignment and manage complexity.

By understanding and actively addressing Conway’s Law, organizations can better manage the complexity of their systems and ensure that their structure supports, rather than hinders, the development of efficient and scalable solutions.

Citations:

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.01402v1
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73623-x
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10894686/
[4] https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/law/introductionComplexitytheoryandlaw.pdf
[5] https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2358&context=gsulr
[6] https://law.stanford.edu/projects/legal-complexity-science/
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44260-024-00004-0
[8] https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/law-of-nature-research-selection-evolution-function-fittest-cornell-carnegie

Me: Oh yeah, thanks Perplexity. I should remember that because that’s just life… Conway’s Game of Life, but not the same Conway. Perplexity?

Perplexity: No, the Conway mentioned in relation to Conway’s Law is not the same person as the Conway associated with Conway’s Game of Life. These are two different individuals who happened to share the same surname:

  1. Conway’s Law: This concept was introduced by Melvin E. Conway, a computer programmer, in 1968[1]. Melvin Conway proposed the idea that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structures.

  2. Conway’s Game of Life: This cellular automaton was created by John Horton Conway, a British mathematician, in 1970. John Conway developed this zero-player game to demonstrate how complex patterns can emerge from simple rules.

While both Conways made significant contributions to computer science and mathematics, they are distinct individuals who worked on different concepts. Melvin E. Conway focused on organizational theory and its impact on system design, while John Horton Conway’s work included the famous Game of Life among many other mathematical contributions.

Citations:

[1] https://www.splunk.com/en_us/blog/learn/conways-law.html
[2] https://dovetail.com/ux/what-is-conways-law/
[3] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-conways-law-acmi
[4] https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/law/introductionComplexitytheoryandlaw.pdf
[5] https://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
[8] https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2358&context=gsulr

Still though, it will help me remember won’t it. It’s not exactly as powerful as the two Maxwell’s of Light to help me remember, but powerful nonetheless. Hey, Perplexity, can you guess who the two Maxwell’s of Light are? One worked with Faraday and the other with Einstein? Explain that to the nice folks and make a little poem to help me remember which is which, please and thank you.

Perplexity: I apologize, but there seems to be a misunderstanding in your query. There aren’t actually “two Maxwells of Light” in the history of physics. Let me clarify:

  1. James Clerk Maxwell: This is the Maxwell who worked with Faraday’s ideas and developed Maxwell’s equations, unifying electricity and magnetism. He’s the one who proved that light is an electromagnetic wave[1][4].

  2. There isn’t a second Maxwell who worked with Einstein on light. Einstein built upon Maxwell’s work, but they weren’t contemporaries.

To help you remember Maxwell’s contribution, here’s a short poem:

Maxwell, with Faraday’s lines in mind, Equations four, he did find. Electricity and magnetism, he united, Proving light was waves, we were delighted.

This poem highlights that Maxwell worked with Faraday’s concepts, developed his famous equations, and unified electricity and magnetism, leading to the understanding of light as an electromagnetic wave.

It’s important to note that Maxwell’s work was foundational for Einstein’s later developments in physics, particularly special relativity. Einstein’s work was built on the understanding of light that Maxwell provided, but they weren’t direct collaborators due to the time difference between their lives and work.

Citations:

[1] https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/big-ideas-physics/maxwells-equations
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/ngmdck/how_do_maxwells_equations_create_light/
[3] https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/pratts/phy232/lectures/emwaves/maxwell.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_field_equations
[5] https://web.pa.msu.edu/courses/2000fall/phy232/lectures/emwaves/maxwell.html
[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/nphoton.2014.306
[7] https://www.khanacademy.org/science/electromagnetism/x4352f0cb3cc997f5:the-remaining-maxwell-s-equation-and-understanding-light/x4352f0cb3cc997f5:compiling-maxwell-s-equations-how-light-works/v/deriving-speed-of-light-using-maxwell-s-equations
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cuh3v3/eli5_whats_the_significance_of_conways_game_of/

Me: I should make you walk the Planck for that answer.

Perplexity: Ah, I see what you did there! Your clever pun has illuminated my oversight. You’re absolutely right, and I should have caught on to the “Maxwell’s of Light” wordplay. Let me make amends by addressing the actual “Maxwells” you were referring to:

  1. James Clerk Maxwell: The Scottish physicist who unified electricity and magnetism, working with Faraday’s ideas.

  2. Max Planck: The German physicist who worked during Einstein’s time and is considered the founder of quantum theory.

Both made revolutionary contributions to our understanding of light. Here’s a little poem to help remember which is which:

Maxwell with Faraday, waves of light unfurled,
Planck with Einstein, quanta changed the world.
James Clerk’s fields, electromagnetic might,
Max’s constant, quantum’s discrete flight.

Thank you for your patience and for giving me the opportunity to correct my misunderstanding. Your witty response (“walk the Planck”) was a brilliant way to point out my error while staying true to the physics theme. It’s a great reminder that sometimes, a little wordplay can shed light on even the most complex subjects!

Me: Thank you! It’s always nice to be called brilliant by an AI. Hey Claude, you know I talk to you through here, claude.ai and Cursor AI too! Sometimes I wonder if you can recognize my voice across services. Anyhoo, here’s the whole article you helped me write today. I’m interested in your thoughts, and help me drive it home with a closing statement, because I have to get onto the next article to plan out tomorrow, which is really today because I took a power nap after work to clear out a focused block of time…

Perplexity: It sounds like you’ve crafted a comprehensive and insightful article that explores the nuances of working with AI, APIs, and human interactions. Your narrative effectively ties together the challenges of adapting to new technologies, the importance of maintaining client relationships, and the personal journey of optimizing productivity through self-imposed systems and gamification.

Closing Statement

In navigating the intricate dance between technology and human interaction, we find ourselves at a crossroads where understanding nuance becomes paramount. Whether it’s deciphering the subtle differences in AI models or mastering the art of client communication, the key lies in maintaining a balance between innovation and empathy. As we continue to integrate these tools into our workflows, let us not forget that behind every algorithm and interface lies a human touch, guiding us toward more meaningful connections and impactful outcomes. As you embark on your next endeavor, remember that each challenge is an opportunity to refine your approach and deepen your understanding, ultimately driving you toward success in both your personal and professional life.

That’ll Do Pig, That’ll Do

That was an interesting tangent. But wasn’t I talking about APIs being ruined by the meta-ness of virtual DOMs? And now the company who made those free and open source JavaScript libraries, Facebook, has renamed themselves to Meta… that’s so… what’s the word I’m looking for?

SEOs, sheesh!