Coefficiencies Newsletter Issue 6

Hey, welcome to issue 6 of the Coefficiencies newsletter! I finally took the Apple Watch Ultra 3 out for a phone-free workout, and a burst of vibe coding produced a fresh Obsidian sync and AI job runner. We capped the week by loading the bikes onto the GO Train and spending Saturday tracing Hamilton’s trails, with plenty of Old Man’s War universe lore from The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi riding shotgun in my head.

links #

Prioritization Should Feel Hard #

John Cutler’s latest TBM 381: Stop Trying To Make Prioritization “Easy” nails the tension I’ve been feeling while juggling renovation schedules, work, and side projects. He breaks prioritization into ambition, capacity orchestration, and net-new investment, then shows why leaning too hard on any single frame leaves you in fantasy, treadmill, or “just throw money at it” territory. It’s a reminder that the uncomfortable dialogue is the point and that frameworks should support, not replace, the ongoing negotiation.

ESP32-S3 E-Paper for Home Status Boards #

I saved the LILYGO T5 4.7" e-paper board as a candidate for the next iteration of the Home Assistant display. It’s an ESP32-S3 rig with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a battery-friendly e-ink panel, and enough GPIO to wire up sensors, so it leans perfectly into my “glanceable dashboards everywhere” energy. The reminder about avoiding endless partial refreshes is also a good nudge to design screens that update in deliberate bursts instead of thrashing the display.

Orchestrating Multiple Agents Like a Team Lead #

This Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit session on multi-agent orchestration has been echoing ever since Vegas. It frames command-line agents as a 5x productivity boost when you run them in parallel, but cautions that code merging becomes the new bottleneck. Temporal gets a shout-out as the workflow glue, and there’s a great aside about needing an “AI nanny” UI that keeps agents on task. Steve Yegge and Gene Kim’s Vibe Coding book is definitely on my reading list this fall.

Vision vs. Structure #

We talk a lot about vision and structure, but big plans stall when no one specifies the tie-breakers, the cadence, or where decisions actually live. Too often, a grand org chart shows “a committee of ten makes the call,” but how do they decide? What if they don’t agree? Who tracks the work, or sets priorities when everything feels important?

It’s easy to sketch the top-level structure, much harder to design the machinery underneath. The glue of real organizations is found in those invisible processes: how decisions get recorded, revisited, and resolved. Without that administrative plumbing, even the boldest strategies leak energy before they reach the ground. The thought for the week: treat those gritty details as a first-class design problem. They’re not bureaucracy, they’re infrastructure.