Build
with
Rigor

Build like no one is coming to save you.

Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus" — "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Think like time is the only currency.

Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life" — "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."

AI does the undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" — "The division of labor... is the great cause of the improvement of productive powers."

Humans do the work that defines direction and intention.

Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics" — "Every action aims at some good; the highest good is happiness."

Let machines read, draft, search, compare, and repeat.

Weber, "The Protestant Ethic" — "Rational action is instrumental; it seeks the most efficient means."

Let people decide what is artful, meaningful, what's enough, and what should never exist.

Kant, "Critique of Practical Reason" — "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

Ideas arrive cheap, sexy and often.

Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation" — "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Judgment is rare among those too close to the fire.

Gadamer, "Truth and Method" — "Understanding is not merely reproductive but productive."

Everything gets a chance. Few earn a future.

Darwin, "On the Origin of Species" — "Survival of the fittest."

Frameworks are useful until they aren't.

Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" — "Discovery commences with the awareness of an anomaly."

They move you forward — they don't tell you where to stop.

Wittgenstein, "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" — "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

You can get to 90% in a minute and that last 10% can take you forever or never.

Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" — "Science does not rest upon solid rock but upon gravel."

Most failures aren't technical.

Virtue Ethics Tradition — "Excellence is a habit, not an act."

They're moral. Bad ideas thrive on ego not talent.

Spinoza, "Ethics" — "He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea."

Someone built something because they could, not because they should.

Hume, "Treatise of Human Nature" — "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."

Prove one thing is true.

Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" — "In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable."

Then — and only then — expand the circle.

Kuhn, "Scientific Revolutions" — "Discovery is a continuous and cumulative process."

This is not about speed.

Slow Epistemology — "Depth requires patience; understanding resists haste."

It's about clarity and meaning.

Frege & Russell, Logical Positivism — "A proposition has meaning only if it can be verified."

Human history tells the story of the how, the why gets a footnote all too often.

Collingwood, "The Idea of History" — "The historian...is not interested in the past by itself, but only as it illustrates the principles of human nature."

"AI-powered" is a meaningless phrase.

Wittgenstein, "Tractatus" — "What can be shown cannot be said."

No one can be your agent except you.

Sartre, "Being and Nothingness" — "We are our choices."

Craft is not decoration. Beauty that serves function is rigor.

Aristotle, "Poetics" — "The chief forms of beauty are order, symmetry, and definiteness."

What if everyone did that?

Kant, Categorical Imperative — "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can will it to become universal law."

Would you choose it for eternity?

Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence — "How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation?"