There are phrases I keep hearing while working with AI these days. Set standards. Build feedback loops. Design for compounding.
But don't we need these same things for ourselves?
To ask better questions, you need to ask a lot of them. But to ask even better questions, you need feedback. Just as brushing your teeth every day won't improve your brushing skills, repetition alone doesn't lead to growth.
But is receiving feedback enough? The ability to judge whether that feedback is valid is itself a skill.
Say someone tells you, "Your question is too abstract." They might be right — but what if you intentionally asked a broad question? Blindly accepting feedback is just as dangerous as blindly ignoring it. Ultimately, you need to train your ability to judge feedback itself.
It's a loop within a loop.
But running this loop only in your head has its limits. You can't compare what you learned yesterday with what changed today.
There's a concept called Compound Engineering. The idea is to build a structure where you never solve the same problem twice. Everyone does Plan → Work → Review. But if you stop there, it's just repetition. Without the fourth step — Compound, leaving what you've learned in a system to create a compounding effect — growth doesn't accumulate.
We already expect this from AI as a matter of course. Store what it's learned, make it perform better next time.
So how does a person leave things in a system? This is where standards come in.
There's a term called harness engineering. It's about putting guardrails and standards around AI so it doesn't veer off course. Turn what you've learned into standards, and the next loop starts from that baseline. The harness is how you realize Compound.
Just as we put a harness on AI, we need one for ourselves too.
So I started writing things down. Turning fleeting memories, thoughts, and experiences into text — making them assets. I set standards for my AI, throw my thoughts at it, get corrections, and record it all again.
I've been using a framework called arscontexta. Through conversation, I structure how I think and work, and save it as markdown files. As records accumulate, the next conversation starts from where the last one left off. No need to repeat the same explanations.
Writing things down still feels awkward. I'm at the stage of borrowing someone else's framework and walking with it. But as the records pile up, they'll become my own harness.
Even brushing your teeth improves when you get guidance from a dentist. You change the angle of your brush, notice the spots you've been missing, and start brushing with intention.
Growth works the same way.
Not repeating the same thing over and over, but raising the bar with every cycle.