A Capacity to Dig, Wrench, and Fill

The end of the year is an interesting time of reflection and such. Where I might bend Avanceé to do similar - and share such a summary in the coming weeks - there’s often just a bit more lurking under the surface of these types of things: namely, what are you actually thinking about.

For example, there was an excellent writeup of a company moving on from their content management system provider to something a bit more custom, brokered by using an LLM to figure out the gaps and code/craft the implementation points. A lot about this post is really good to understand from the perspective of enterprise content management on the side of development, but what’s the actual takeaway for those who might not be in as large an org, or who have different constraints?

Let me pull from one our longer running experiments with the Brilliant Labs Framework glasses…

When there is a capacity to be curious, you have a decision. Either you call the curiosity a blocker, and find detours around it. Or, you find curiosity is a shovel and look to find ways to dig, wrench, and fill hole shaped imaginations. For Avanceé, this experiment has opened the door to a type of learning about machine learning and artificial intelligence which doesn’t quite fit the narrative of many. We aren’t driving towards a credentialed approach which might be repeatable or irrelevant over a few years. We are also not quite skilled enough to unleash software/services which might turn your unfocused/haphazard behaviors into something more diligent, focused, and probably profitable.

Avancee exists to help persons figure out what their next steps might be. And the shape of this manifests in a kind of mentoring or coaching towards outcomes very much measured not be the cadence of a publishing cycle, but by the skillful, ethical, creative, or insightful application of tooling and behaviors for critical outcomes. So when we share a summary of what we’ve been up to, it’s to get you to understand the shape of your own capacity to dig, wrench, and craft your desired present (not future).

When we go back to that post about how Cursor moved away from their content management platform, we can now see it for what it really is: an exposition on curiosity which turned into experimentation, which turned into insightful application. And even if there are things missing in such a perspective (as talked about by a person from their former content management vendor), you can be rest assured that the foundation of what you might be digging wonder be easily swayed by the swings of a fad, the fortunes of its sponsors, or even those folks crafting narratives which might never be repeated other than in academic journals.