Yes, the article really only makes sense if you're both practiced Zen and done some intense parallel programming.

"Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" makes more sense in a group setting. I read extracts of it with a Zen priest in a meditation group.

There's a woman I read about a while back who did here PhD thesis on the notion that David Hume's contribution to the Enlightenment was inspired by conversations with a Jesuit monk who had returned to France from a long engagement in a Buddhist area of India. DDG is telling me it might be Allison Gopnik but I've no recollection of the name, only the contents.

She proved that he made a trip to a town where the monk lived after his return, and the library contained a copy of his reports. She could not prove more than opportunity but she strongly suspects that Hume not only read the report but may have met with the monk as well.

> What sort of insight am I missing?

The article makes a lot more sense if you've practiced Zen.

Think of it as someone's way of making sense of Zen teachings by related them to something they already understand.

It is. The next post in the blog expands on the idea in concrete terms. The author doesn’t explicitly say so, but based on the shape of it I would assume all we have right now are the introduction and first full post of what is intended to be a multi-part series.

(Speaking as a lapsed participant in a zen community. Opinions are my own, so others may disagree.)

The challenge for these “Zen and my job” types of work is that much of Zen practice is (deliberately) a bit of an inkblot test. If there’s any real Big Truth to it, it’s that it’s all one big muddle that everyone has to muddle through for themself. Unlike in many Western religious traditions, there is no presumption of univocality - even within the canonical literature, every opinion is understood to be the author’s alone and represents their own personal attempts at muddling things through. It’s just that some people and works are regarded as being particularly worth a read.

But that’s never explicitly stated. Which can be particularly confusing to people who grew up in religious traditions that do presume univocality and a greater degree of spiritual authority. Hence these works by people who see one particular bit that clicks for them and conclude, “Ah, this is what Zen is really about, I must go tell others!” without realizing that perhaps they just stumbled across an inkblot that they found to be particularly evocative.

> Fred Brooks and the mythical man month observed that communication between people expands faster than linear, and that adding more people to a project makes it later.

In my experience with more than a couple dozen software projects, the ideal team size to successfully deliver a non-trivial effort is between five to nine people.

  One subject matter expert visionary
  One technical architect visionary
  One or two technical masters
  One or two UI/UX masters
  One or two padawans capable of becoming a master

Staffing exceeding the above for an individual team is more a managerial genitalia contest than anything focused on organizational success.

Amdahl's law says something similar, adding more processors to a problem eventually gives almost no speedup because parts of the problem cannot be parallelized and need to be done sequentially.

To the people wondering the meaning of the article, it's I think this.

You are absolutely right.

It is just some daydreaming verbiage trying to connect totally disparate domains in a fanciful manner; nonsense and drivel.

As I continue reading An Introduction to Parallel Programming, I cannot help but notice a connection between communication among processors, communication among human beings, and communication within the individual self.

Whut?

I wonder how much a good process of meetings, tickets or whatever sort of documents etc for handling new ideas and features would speed this up or bring it back to linear. I've been in some orgs where good organization at the level above me can make the required communication between me and other dev teams lower and let us live in "good" silos

There is no substance. It's navel-gazing dribble.

The "about" section of the website is equally vacuous:

    SmolNero is a philosophical startup rooted
    in first-principles thinking.

    We explore how humans relate to technology—
    how we speak to it, depend on it, thank it,
    and sometimes forget it’s there at all.
    
    We don’t claim expertise. We see ourselves 
    as translators—working at the crossroads of
    emotion and programming, curiosity and care

(The two M-dashes are also suspicious)

I don't understand what you just wrote has to do with anything here.

What really seems to make a difference is how well the project and the organization are at being split into indepedent groups.

I've been on projects where everybody needs to know everything, and on projects where many groups can be insulated from others.

The more your group can work without needing a meeting with other groups, the more things can progress in parallel.

Some projects won't work well with that constraint though. And some organizations won't either.

I think it's kind of fun now. Agents can interact with Linear. I'm still playing around with like does an issue achieve anything? What is the fastest way to get a bug from the observing session to the originating session?

But it's secondary.

The wall is build. If you can AI program, your problem is the build is too slow, too unreliable, not secure enough from a supply chain standpoint.

That is where one competent senior hacker tops out today. The agents are yielding to a CI that gets 35% per-vCPU occupancy.

The wall right now is skill or build, depending on your skill.

Seems to be run by a married couple of (maybe) burnt out account managers. That, in combination with some AI help, explains the empty "LinkedIn slop" writing style I think.

It's not often I comment on blog posts, but this is honestly one of the most meaningless blogs I've ever read (not counting those fully AI-generated SEO ones). I don't get why it ended up so high on Hacker News; it has an interesting title I guess, but pretty much no substance.

There have always been snake oil salesmen, for awhile they had to put the effort into knocking on your door peddling MLMs, now they're making more impressive snake oil, but vacuous, with LLMs.

I found elsewhere referring to her as an "independent philosopher", but maybe Rachel Paine? https://archive.philosophersmag.com/was-hume-a-secret-buddhi...

I've heard that project architecture has a strong enough impact on feature completion rate that you can infer how tightly coupled vs loosely plugin based it is just from graphs of feature release.

It’s like distributed transactions, or cache-coherency protocols for CPUs.

Edit: aaaand I hadn’t read the article

What are you talking about? A properly prompted agent generates a project with a fast, reproducible, and isolatable build. One of the best things about agentic AI is that I spend far less time on devops and on waiting on builds.

There are low-insensity regimes where it's all Python or whatever, and if you're in one, great.

When you're dealing with multiple platforms, or hardware accelerators, or mostly all of economically relevant shit in the AI era you don't get a small, clean, fast build.

Fable can't print a Tauri faux-native app without dragging in half of LLVM.

For greenfield work, we are using mostly Rust, although small utilities built with Go or Python are also acceptable provided they have a comprehensive set of unit tests, an integration test suite, well-defined specifications and acceptance criteria, and thorough documentation. Once you have that, it's much easier for the AI to work on it. (Our main motivation for doing this is that it takes far fewer tokens now to get stuff done since we have all that, to the point I can leave Qwen 3.6 running in 24/7 loops accomplishing things.)

If your build is bloated and slow, it would seem prudent to go and fix that, possibly converting a codebase from some other language or build system to something that can be built and tested very quickly. Slow builds and slow unit tests are a choice.