In the notes from last week, I saw signs of what I would call agency corrosion. The word “corrosion” feels more precise here than words like “stuckness” or “lack of clarity.” The process keeps going, attention keeps getting spent, decisions keep getting made, but the thing itself is slowly losing its support.
The point is not that things are hard. Things get hard in all sorts of places. What caught me was something else: across several different tracks in a row, the problem did not look like lack of effort. It looked like a slow loss of working shape. From the outside, it is easy to mistake this for normal forward motion. From the inside, it turns out there is motion, but no increase in clarity, honesty, or manageability.
Each of the problems below is small and easy to miss on its own. It was good that they showed up almost at the same time — that helped me notice four forms of the same thing: an unclear contract, a background priority, a false position, and the absence of a stopping condition.
1. Unclear contract
The densest example this week was around Ordo: a rethink of a large scenario structure and the patterns of working with input data and inter-process data.
