Reflection • • 1 min read
The Elitist Trap
A field guide for countering common traps of misguided experience.
NC
Nino Chavez
Product Architect at commerce.com
Search Signal Dispatch
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Open Kitchen
I went looking for other cooks and found closed kitchens — not hostile, just complete. The Bear turned out to be the show that named what's actually missing in agent-assisted work, and what it might cost me to build the alternative.
The A/B Test That Built the Lathe
I pasted a two-paragraph plan into a terminal and walked away for two days. The strategy package that came back was good. Then I asked Claude to do it again from a template, without me in the feedback loop. The template version landed at 70-80% of the quality in 10-15x less time. The gap — and the loop that closed it — has a name from another century.
The Scaffolding the Agent Doesn't Build
I sent Adam Bender's Google I/O talk to Claude with a note calling it the most insightful take I'd heard on AI and our industry, and asked for a LinkedIn caption. The draft came back confessing things about my work that weren't true. The story of why is the same story Bender is telling on a Google I/O stage.