essay · 2026 · 5 min

Different problems, same shape

on noticing the same three moves everywhere.

II used to think debugging, writing a caption, and finishing a chorus were three unrelated skills I happened to have. They're not. They're the same move wearing different clothes: find the thing that's actually broken, not the thing that looks broken, and fix only that.

A bug report says the button doesn't work. The actual problem is usually two functions away, hiding behind a symptom that happened to be loud. A caption that isn't landing looks like a wording problem. The actual problem is usually that nobody asked for it in the first place. Same shape, different field.↑ this took way longer to notice than I'd like to admit

The details change constantly. The shape of a good fix almost never does.

This is either a useful mental model or a sign I'm bad at compartmentalizing, and I've made peace with not knowing which. What I do know is that once I stopped treating 'software brain,' 'marketing brain,' and 'music brain' as separate rooms, everything got faster. I stopped re-learning how to think every time I switched tabs.

The abstraction isn't free, though. Sometimes I catch myself trying to A/B test a chord progression, which is objectively unhinged behavior. But mostly it means I can walk into an unfamiliar problem and ask the boring, useful question first: what is actually happening here, underneath the specific words being used to describe it.the chord progression thing is a joke. mostly.