Why I Love Being Wrong
I Am Often Wrong
A product leader shares his six-step problem-solving loop — understand, gather, define, plan, set a goal, act — and explains why iterating through it can feel thrashy but is healthy. The most common failures, he says, are skipping a clear problem definition or a simple approach, which leads to complex plans and fuzzy success criteria. He welcomes feedback and being wrong, because it sharpens the problem and speeds up learning.
All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.
- alasano
Haven't seen any Claude Code specific examples of Boris admitting he's wrong and then actually fixing things in the way the community wants.
There are mind blowing bugs in CC that go unaddressed for months.
Something like 15-20% of all Fable messages in CC are invisible to users. You've most likely noticed this when Claude references something it said but it never said it?
It happens frequently when Fable outputs a message above a certain number of tokens just before doing a tool call.
This has been going on for months. If "users can't see messages the agent sends" isn't a critical issue that gets addressed within 24 hours, I don't really care if you admit you're often wrong, we know.
- pclowes
Having listened to him give a couple of talks I am always struck by how much he talks and writes like Claude code.
I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything.
I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner.
Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it.
And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude.
Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.
- lopatin
This is about as insightful as the "draw the rest of the owl" meme, with a bit of Lex Fridman style forced humility in the title.
- infamia
> Something that people learn quickly when they work with me is that my approach to pretty much every problem is:
> ...
> 6. Act with urgency to achieve the goal
If everything is urgent, then nothing is. This guy sounds miserable to work for and with. Assuming this is accurate and not just hyperbole, he is essentially saying he has no prioritization skills because everything is urgent. I think most people who have been around the block have worked with people like this, and unbeknownst to them, their coworkers develop a default snooze button associated with most of their requests and projects.
- cube00
I can't say I agree with forcing your team to use your own personal "framework" of approaching a problem or else you'll get "feedback".
> Sometimes I will give feedback to people when they are missing steps in the framework, or are poorly executing some of the steps. I expect the same feedback in return.
I also don't like that urgency is built in as the standard process either, no wonder everyone is burnt out.
> 6. Act with urgency to achieve the goal
- glimshe
Nothing more annoying than a manager with a personal know-it-all framework requiring people to follow it or else they get "feedback".
- weakfish
I still am mind blown at how bad CC is as software. It’s just not that hard of a problem. I get that harnesses aren’t trivial, but they’re not insane either. And the fact that it’s running on a JS runtime (that they bought!) is also crazy. Why not Go/BubbleTea? Why not literally anything native? It makes no sense
I don’t want to be a jackass, but it’s hard to take anything Boris says seriously when he’s headed up such weird software. And it’s not like resourcing or money is an issue for them. If Claude was so damn good, why does CC suck?
- otterley
This seems strongly aligned with the Amazon doc-writing and decision making process. I found it to be unusually effective as a business process, and took it with me when I left to my current role.
Making thoroughly informed decisions and iterating on a decision doc before committing to a direction and plan is better than every alternative I’ve ever observed in my career.
The criticism I’ve read thus far on this thread seems unwarranted. I give the same kind of feedback to my mentees when their work product or process could use improvement.