Many leaders acquire authority through ambition and manipulation. Iโm not referring to them.
But a test of leadership for those who acquire authority organically, with the will of those being led, is to maintain the zeal and principles which put you into that position, after you encounter the machinery designed to exhaust, exasperate, deter, and demoralize.
Any conversation
A thing I've been doing lately is trying to come to the same conclusions others have without looking their the direct techniques and code. Last night I tried to figure out why people do vector based retrieval for RAG and ended up running these experiments: n0tls.com/โฆ/2026-09-03-i-think-โฆrag-with-grep.html
I'm still going to do an explore agent.
โฆ
NIH syndrome? I am guilty of it too. I love implementing things from scratch, you learn a lot by doing so and you get to own the codebase end-to-end, so no surprises and fighting around othersโ choices. It can get exhausting too though, in the end I succumb to using off-the-shelf components because my primary goals move at a higher level.


