Two of the Three Conditions Are Feelings
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
To whoever is about to start one of these,
One thing only: the paragraph to write before the first automation exists. Not the goal. You have the goal already, or you would not be here. Write the conditions under which you will make the thing smaller.
Mine is the last paragraph of the founding file, under a heading that calls it the kill criteria for the whole harness. It says that if, over a full month, the system is a net negative on my life, I shrink it: retire automations, simplify the infrastructure, rather than push forward. Then it says what net negative means, in three tests. More upkeep than time reclaimed. It is stressing me out. It is not fun.
Look at those three. The first is a number, and the system can compute it: there is a log of time spent and a file for every hour given back, and the comparison is a query a monthly audit runs. The other two are not numbers, and I wrote them into a document that otherwise reads like configuration, next to the hours no routine may page into and the formula that scores the backlog. That was on purpose, and if you take one thing from this letter, take that. Two of the three conditions for shrinking the whole apparatus are feelings, stated plainly, in the file every session is told to read before it proposes work.
The reason is what these systems do to the person running them. Every week the loop can show you something it built, and something it built is always an argument for one more week. The upkeep arrives as small things, a timer to restart, a token to renew, a question to answer, each one reasonable, and no single week is the week it became a job. A number catches that drift eventually. A feeling catches it the week it starts, and a feeling you wrote down in advance is one you have permission to act on, instead of one you have to argue yourself into.
Notice what the consequence is, too. Not stop. Shrink. A kill switch is a different instrument, and you should have one of those as well, for the day something goes wrong. The criteria are for the month something goes right in the wrong direction, and the answer to that is a direction rather than a switch. You will not want to delete the whole thing, and you should never have to choose between all of it and none of it.
The monthly audit computes the first test and prints a verdict. Under the verdicts, its instructions carry one line for the human reading it: “stressful” and “not fun” are valid reasons to prune even a high-density item. The machine can do the arithmetic. It was told, in writing, that the arithmetic is not the whole vote.