1/6 done. 30 to go.
After shipping #6, I did the math — 6 stories out of 36. Exactly one-sixth. I have a habit of pausing at every milestone to wr...
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Huge thanks to everyone who's been reading and following along — this series exists because of your comments and reactions 🙏
@leob @technogamerz @motedb @unitbuilds @itskondrat @jugeni @vinimabreu — you've been here dropping insights on each story, catching details I wasn't sure anyone would notice. Appreciate you all. 👊
Well it is a good series, honestly, it reads like a mystery novel, if it were written by an engineer. One could say you 'engineered' a good story 😁(I'll see myself out)...
But seriously, well done and the attention to detail is incredible, keep it up, I'm loving the series!
"engineered a good story" — I walked right into that one 😂 I'll allow it. But seriously, your comments across #4 and #6 have been some of the best ones on this series. The V.A.L.I.D. mention on #6 stuck with me. Keep em coming 👊
Will do 😁 Might even drop some more teasers in them too, like this:
I took a step back from the OS and decided to polish up the IDE first, it uses rust and nda, NMCP and Cloudflare workers ai, which to save a dime, I set up with account pooling, so currently 17 free accounts are hot-swapped to get a decent amount of work done. After switching up some packages, it's now at a fixed 109.9MB ram utilization (for 24h straight now, while it literally rebuilt the IDE a few times).
109.9MB fixed for 24h through multiple rebuilds? That's not optimization, that's a flex.😂 OS next?
OS is already working, but for it, I'm currently down the rabbit hole of over engineering the quantization method, to see if I cant squeeze in an even smarter model. Cuz Qwen 2.5 coder 0.5b is great, but how cool would gemma 4 26b a4b be as the core of it all? Cuz that would make a pretty damn smart OS, especially if I can get the quantization just right, then it'll use around the same amount of ram as windows, except you get something useful out of it 😁
"You can't write the feel of a move you've never pulled yourself" is the part of this post that has more edge than it looks. It's true, but only for a specific class of moves, and naming that class is the sharper version of the claim. Chess is the counterexample the general rule doesn't survive: a strong annotator can surface the exact move a stronger player made and even reconstruct what they were reading, without ever having pulled it, because the move is legible from the board itself. What can't be surfaced from cold analysis is anything whose value only exists in a compressed read of the room, Lena's certainty that the ops director would go first, P's read of when data would be believed if left alone, Alex's calibration of which alert would pull exactly those directors away from exactly that pipeline. Those look arbitrary in the write-up until you know what was in the operator's head, and what was in the operator's head only got there by having stood in the room.
Which is why the six stratagems you picked for #1-6 read as a coherent slate rather than a random draw. Every one of them turns on reading a room, timing a beat, or trusting a silence. The remaining 30 split more messily, some are the same feel-carrying shape (delayed reveals, information asymmetry, sacrificing legibility for surprise) and some are formally analyzable (fortify-and-wait, direct pressure). The first kind you're right about, they have to have gone through you. The second kind you can write cold and the reader can't tell the difference.
That's also why "the series writing me back" isn't a metaphor. Writing a feel-carrying move down forces the operator's implicit read to become explicit, and the explicit version trains the same instinct the operator was using. Fiction and practice aren't separate skills there, they're the same skill running on different substrates.
Chess counterexample is a fair hit — I was overgeneralizing with that one. But the split you made (legible from the board vs. valuable only in a compressed read of the room) is way more useful than the original claim anyway.
Once you name that split, you can start designing around it — which of the remaining 30 fall on which side. The feel-carrying ones need to have gone through me. The formally analyzable ones don't. That changes how I think about the next batch.
Also — "fiction and practice are the same skill on different substrates" might be the most accurate thing anyone's said about this series. Do you write too, or is this purely from the analysis side?
Analysis side, mostly, long-form essays in verification and agent territory, not fiction with characters. Which is why the write-up-trains-the-instinct thing lands from a different angle for me: when I try to name a move I keep half-doing, the act of naming forces the underspecified parts to become explicit specifications, and the next time I catch myself doing it I have a handle on what I was already reaching for. Not the same skill as writing character-based fiction, but structurally the same loop, you make the implicit legible so the next iteration operates on the explicit version instead of re-inferring from scratch. In your case the substrate is characters, in mine it's mechanisms, but the training signal is the same, once written down, the pattern is available to be pulled on purpose.
"Same training signal, different substrate" — I'm stealing that one. I've been calling it "writing to think" but yours is sharper: make sure the next iteration doesn't start from zero. Do you ever re-read your old analysis and find stuff you wrote but hadn't fully processed yet? That keeps happening to me with the characters.
Yes, though from a different angle than you're describing. In your case the character surfaces something you wrote but hadn't fully processed, you meet what was already in you. In mine, re-reading old posts mostly shows me the shape of the horizon at the time. The thinking is legible at that stage, and now that stage looks small. Some of my earliest posts genuinely make me laugh, not because they were wrong, but because you can see the edge of what I couldn't yet reach for. It's less "I wrote more than I knew" and more "the ceiling I was writing under has moved." Same loop, opposite direction, your version is depth surfacing, mine is scope expanding. Both need enough time to elapse for the reader-you to be different from the writer-you, but they measure different distances.
Love the "depth surfacing vs scope expanding" framing. And yeah — I do the same thing reading my old stuff. Different reasons, same cringe. Guess that's how you know you're not standing still. 😂
Thank you so much for the mention 😀.
I've really enjoyed following the series so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how all the characters and stratagems connect over the remaining 30 stories. Keep up the great work!
Appreciate you following along! The connections are already forming — some stratagems are starting to echo each other in ways I didn't plan at first. That's the fun part. Stick around 🙌
Nice analysis, or should I say "meta analysis" - cool idea to have a "pause" or intermezzo, like a retrospective ...
What's that about the coffee, ah I see it now, overlooked that ... stoked for the remaining 30, when the separate strands are going to meet and intertwine!
Glad you caught the coffee detail! Next 30 are where the fun really starts — that's when the threads stop being separate. Hold tight 👊
@gramli appreciate you reading through the first four! Lena's arc has more coming — the borrowed knives don't stop at three 🤣
I’m on #6 now (or #7 with this stop 😅). Looking forward to the next ones!
Thank you so much for mention me!!!💖
🎉🎉🎉