The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Rick Manelius

rickmanelius.com

Professional noticer. Self-experimenter. Compulsive sharer. Click to read Rick Manelius, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Essays / personalEngineering management / careersAI / ML

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
137 from 10 May 2021 to 4 Nov 2026
Posting
weekly (50 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.rickmanelius.com/feed

2026 46

  1. The Ingredients of Taste
  2. How Extreme an AI Transformation Are We Talking About?
  3. Called It!
  4. Grab Bag: Smart TV Liposuction Edition
  5. The Playground Study, Visualized
  6. It Pays to Procrastinate On Your Taxes (Thanks, Grok Bot!)
  7. Reading Business Books Like The Bible
  8. “Written with AI” is the new “Sent from my iPhone”
  9. Podcast: Forward Deployed Executives w/CTO Lunches
  10. Grab Bag: Big Ass Slop Grenades Edition
  11. Committing 20 Years to Community Building
  12. MTTR: Mean Time to Reinvention
  13. Creating AI Workflows that Compound
  14. Voiceover: Impossible
  15. Missing Money: 15 Minutes for $1500
  16. Leave Yourself a Momentum Matchstick
  17. The High Opportunity Cost of Hatred
  18. AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)
  19. Grab Bag: The Tin Man Peptides Edition
  20. Dead-simple Explainer Videos with HyperFrames
  21. Kill Stupid Ideas Faster
  22. What If It’s an Advantage?
  23. Forward Deployed Executives: The Next Billion-Dollar AI Unblock
  24. The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough
  25. Using AI to Call Bullshit On Yourself
  26. Converting Professional Development Courses Into an AI Context
  27. Hero Half-Life
  28. High Wall, Warm Home
  29. The Low Bar of Exceptionalism
  30. Grab Bag: Banana Water Edition
  31. What I’m Re-reading: The Captain Class
  32. Kathleen Joddy Rajter
  33. RIP, Mom
  34. Are Chinese AI Models Risky?
  35. What TODO When You Have 99 TODOs
  36. Your Book, Now Interactive
  37. The Curiosity Claw
  38. “You Need to Learn How to Read”
  39. The Return to Analog
  40. Violent Self-Discipline
  41. You Know What To Do
  42. Friends Are Where The Bikes Are
  43. Who’s Building This?
  44. Killing Creative Constipation With Claude Code
  45. Creative Constipation
  46. Prompt More

2025 43

  1. My 3 Words: 2026
  2. 5,001 Push-ups in 1-Month Made Me Weaker
  3. Why AI Children Can't Replace the Real Thing
  4. Watching People Experience Their AI Eureka Moment
  5. School Lunch Debt
  6. New Cognitive Bias Regarding AI
  7. Be Neo, Not WALL•E
  8. Generational Echo Chambers
  9. What I’m Reading: Boom Town
  10. 20 Years Later: A Voice-to-Text Solution
  11. Seeking First to Understand
  12. The Future of Personality & Medical Assessments
  13. Recurring Meeting Purgatory
  14. Gamifying Financial Literacy
  15. Remembering It’s Just a Game
  16. Chasing Novelty Part 2: Workouts
  17. What I’m Reading: Evidence That Demands a Verdict
  18. Learn Kung Fu or Forget How to Walk: AI's Double-Edged Promise
  19. Quantum Leaps vs Compound Effort
  20. The User Experience of You
  21. The Prompt Gap
  22. Nailing the Moment That a Trend Emerges
  23. "But Everybody Already Knows This!"
  24. Vitamins and Dunkin Donuts
  25. What I'm Reading: Reframe Your Brain by Scott Adams
  26. Early Detection With Affordable, Full-body MRIs
  27. Failure of Imagination
  28. Contact Mapping Cold Leads with Deep Research
  29. Permissionless Prompting
  30. The Cost of Denying Unintended Consequences
  31. Have You Considered AI Therapy?
  32. What I'm Reading: Brian Cain Series
  33. Chasing Novelty
  34. Death and Forced Reflection
  35. Kind is Better Than Nice
  36. Did the Devil Flush the Toilet?
  37. Fast, Personalized Fact Checking
  38. Inspiring Kids to Fail Faster
  39. We Need Wardley Maps More Than Ever
  40. Timeline Splits
  41. A Childhood Within The Woods
  42. AI and the Death of the American, Rags-to-Riches Story
  43. My 3 Words: 2025

2024 23

  1. Kicking Off 2025 With Heroic Elite
  2. Recommendation: The Road
  3. Celebrating Consistency: Roger Dickerman
  4. Allergic to Victimhood
  5. 1,000 Applicants Per Role
  6. Bitcoin at $100K
  7. The Shrinking Half-Life of Best Practices
  8. The AI Agents Are Coming
  9. Permission to Purge
  10. In Praise of Accountability Tools
  11. Embracing AI
  12. In Defense of Morning Walks
  13. July 30-day Challenge: Vitality
  14. June 30-day Challenge: Smart Notes
  15. Book Announcement: Save Your Startup
  16. May 30-day Challenge: AI
  17. April 30-day Challenge: Less But Better
  18. “The Hot Mess Express” vs “In The Zone”
  19. March 30-day Challenge: Grief
  20. February's 30-day Challenge: Flow
  21. Assume Positive Intent
  22. The Website RFP & The Impossible-to-Estimate GI Joe Line Item
  23. My 3 Words: 2024

2023 18

  1. Incoming: New Book on Startup Playbooks
  2. Career News
  3. If You Gave It Away For Free, Would They Use It?
  4. Join me on Substack Notes
  5. Amazon Versus eBay Customers
  6. Saving Yourself (Or Your Startup) 3,333 Hours
  7. When the Stakes Are High, and the Moment is Brief
  8. Courage Compresses Time
  9. The Misunderstood Genius & Product-market Fit
  10. Adults in the Room
  11. Life Update: Murphy!
  12. 1x1s: Getting Started & Making Them Effective
  13. What is Done? Part 2: Defining Victory
  14. Beware of “Somebody-itis”
  15. What’s Your North Star AND Next Action?
  16. 1x1s: The Highest Leverage Activity in Your Startup
  17. Hiring Devs: Product vs. Project Mindset
  18. "Where Do I Get Started?"

2022 6

  1. My 3 Words for 2023
  2. What is Done?
  3. Persuading With WIIFM (What's In It For Me)
  4. A Great Way to Create What You Hate
  5. No-Code Platforms Having Their Breakthrough Moment
  6. A New Home, A New Website

2021 1

  1. A little bit about a lot of things.