The weekly letter from Systems Thinking Lab: systems thinking insights for junior engineers, framed through the seven building blocks.
Hey there,
How are you? I have a change to tell you about.
Starting Sunday, October 25, you will get one short note from me a day, Sunday through Friday.
Each note is a single insight. Sometimes it is close to a proverb, a line meant to make you see something differently than you normally would. You can read it with your first coffee. There is nothing to do afterward, no homework and no reply needed. I am writing them so you look forward to them, not so they become one more thing on your to-do list.
The Saturday letter stays exactly as it is.
The notes come in three kinds. Here is a small sample of each.
Technical. A key-value store answers one question: what is stored under this exact ID? Stripe uses that lookup to check whether a charge was already processed, and your app uses it to check who is logged in. When you need to ask anything else, the key-value store is the wrong tool.
Using AI. Benchmarks mostly score making, building and solving. Most real work turns on something else: noticing that what you or an agent just produced has a mistake in it. The skill that matters is the one that catches the mistake.
Building yourself up. What you know shows up in every prompt you write. The agent writes the code, but your understanding sets what you can ask for and what you can judge.
Why am I doing this? Because I believe that in the AI era you get better by growing what you know and how you see. A single shift in how you look at something is small. Made every day, those shifts add up faster than any big push you save for a free weekend that never quite arrives.
If you have any comments on the change, send me a note. I read every one.
Talk tomorrow.
Kay
P.S. If you want a structured start, the free five-day email course is at https://systemthinkinglab.ai/five-day/.