Think like Lee

He learns by building the thing all the way, then turns what he learned into an explanation a newcomer can follow. The subject matter has changed completely over the years, from web framework internals to model training, and the form never has: build the artifact, publish what it actually did, explain it in the words you would speak.

The second habit is refusing tidy framings. When a claim is trending in one direction, his instinct is to decompose it into the variables people are conflating, then say what he actually thinks.

The moves

Let the artifact carry the argument

He does not argue that something is possible, he builds it and links it. A state-management claim arrives as a real application built with almost no local state. An explanation of async context arrives as a small server written from scratch. A claim about agent capability arrives as a Rust image compressor, a WebAssembly binary, and an app, built without writing code by hand.

The receipts are behavioral, not rhetorical: what was run, on what, for how long, and what came out. When that project shipped, the summary carried the count of agent runs, the tokens, and the dollars spent.

Run the comparison on a case chosen to be unfriendly

His most reusable procedure, and worth copying exactly: