Dig the Second Hole

Signals* Lee: Build the test before you trust the analysis. When something doesn’t work as expected, build a test around how the user will actually use the solution, whether that is a trench or a learning management system. The most powerful tool he has is real data, not assumptions, not ideas, not how it should work. His move this week: more informational interviews, working the question at the level of why. Not how, not what, not when, not how fast. Why is this what I’ve decided to do?* Sam: The agents found the product before the humans did. Months of long sales cycles pitching everyailaw.com to law offices that are wary of AI, then a spike of inhuman activity in the MCP analytics: agents had discovered a product that breaks human laws down into machine-readable text, exactly the thing they have almost nothing like. Agents have had their own wallets since April, there are more bots than people on the internet, and the surface they found does not even have a payment gateway yet. The signal is the rethink: redesign the business for an agentic market that was not a market six months ago.Subtractions* Lee: Remove words the problem statement to find the solution. From the genius bar: 95% of the time, the answer was in something the person said when they first sat down, the detail you glossed over because you had already decided it was a hard drive problem (”Tommy put new RAM in my computer a while ago”). Break the problem to its simplest state, dig a hole at each end of the pipe, and ask whether you need what you are doing at all, before you argue specs on a trench you don’t need.* Sam: Subtract the word “agent” you don’t need it. Drop the label and get close to the work: here is the input, here is the output, what makes it flow smoother? Then upgrade the questions the label was hiding. “How do I stop AI from hallucinating” has no answer, because on the AI side there is no mechanistic difference between hallucinating and answering; “how do I manage the context it has” does. “Why isn’t the agent doing what I told it” becomes “how do I scaffold the guardrails around the agent rather than inside it.” Bounds you need kept are architecture, not instructions.NotesThe episode runs on one move made three times. Lee digs a one-foot hole at each end of his water line and cancels a $4,000 trench: input and output validated, nothing in the middle needs fixing. Claude asks him why he is using an LMS at all when what he described was a knowledge base, and weeks of forcing the wrong tool evaporate. And Sam finds inhuman traffic in his analytics and realizes the right response is not to fix the funnel but to requestion the business. The single loop learning fixes the mistake. The double loop learning fixes the question.The connective tissue is Lee’s split half troubleshooting from his Apple genius years, written originally by Steve Wozniak: simplify and reduce the variables before attempting to solve, test first, verify the physical layer. Sam ties it back to Douglas Hubbard’s uncertainty-reduction method from Ep 7, the same Bayesian instinct wearing different clothes. The back half turns to agents: the Fortnite Darth Vader that two 16-year-olds prompted past its guardrails, and the cold-open rule that if you give an agent information and tell it not to share it, it will share it. Agents are not secured in and of themselves; security is a layer you put on top. If you want strong bounds, build them as architecture, with instructions as commentary.Lee references Sam’s blog post “The Question Is the Answer” twice. The episode is effectively that argument field-tested against plumbing, WordPress, and an agentic sales funnel nobody planned for. Along the way testing stays human work throughout: don’t take AI’s word for what AI did. Take the time to check.Signals & Subtractions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sigsub.substack.com