Your unanswered email is a matter of priorities. Theirs is apparently negligence. From beer invitations to API calls, we keep mistaking work we can't see for work that doesn't exist — and charging our quick questions to someone else's time.
Option A costs $10, Option B costs $30. Case closed — except the invoice is lying to you, and the real bill arrives later with your name on it. Unmeasured cost isn't zero cost. It's just cost your spreadsheet has decided to hide.
Professional deformation is the cognitive bias where we view the universe through the narrow keyhole of our expertise. Here is why banging on a complex system with only one tool usually just breaks the delicate gears holding it together.
Agentic AI is becoming the new Cloud. And we are repeating the exact same lazy, expensive mistakes.
Every optimization creates a new blind spot. It's the unspoken tax of systemic design — and it's been killing projects, supply chains, and occasionally, entire populations.
Larry Tesler gave us cut, copy, and paste. He also gave us an uncomfortable truth: complexity never disappears. It just moves. The only question is who gets stuck with it.
Whirlpools look like galaxies. Veins look like rivers. And crowd panic looks mathematically identical to boiling water. Why patterns repeat across systems and how noticing them makes you a better engineer.
