Forem: Orchid Files

I build projects and manage teams without a single call

Orchid Files — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

What I dislike most is short calls. When someone tells me, “I have a slot tomorrow at 11:30, let’s do a 10-minute call”. That’s the worst thing possible. For the other person, it’s just another call, one of dozens they have that day. But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. And I might spend the entire day thinking about it.

And it’s especially unpleasant if I end up not liking the person on that short call. Their tone, manner of speaking, their emotions. That can ruin my whole day. Even though the exact same thing could have been discussed over text.

Often the reason for a call is that someone doesn’t want to formulate their thoughts in text. It’s easier to start talking and think out loud than to structure the thought first. A call lets you improvise, fill things in as you go, and jump from one idea to another. Text requires you to think first and takes time.

Imagine the year 1500. A war is going on, you’re an army general, and you need to assign tasks to officers who are thousands of miles away from you. You can’t call them and verbally explain the importance of the tasks, the values of the military campaign, and your vision for conquering the world. All you can do is write out the assignment, put your seal on it, and dispatch a messenger who will reach the recipient after several weeks. If the recipient has questions after reading the letter, he won’t be able to get an answer right away. That is why you have to think through the contents of the letter, the list of tasks, and the depth of explanation. To make it brief and at the same time include all the details. Because once the messenger disappears over the horizon, you will no longer be able to change the contents or get the letter back.

Today we don’t have those constraints. We can write an underdefined task and fill in the details on a call. We can call an employee and pull them out of their flow because we’re “managers” and can afford to do it. It is easier for us to record a voice message than to spend time typing.

I think I was very lucky that I became a programmer first, and only later a manager and founder. When I was a programmer, I immediately came to hate calls. And when I became a team lead, I always tried to structure the team in a way that minimized them. If I had the choice between calling someone and writing to them, I always chose text.

Over time this turned into a full-fledged approach. Now I build entire projects and manage teams without a single call. I only need to think through the task, write it out in text, discuss the details over text, and get a completion report over text. And in that report, just the word “Done” would be enough for me, rather than a two-page write-up of how it was done.

There was a time when I worked in companies where everything was built around Scrum. Dailies, retrospectives, syncs, planning. I even remember the days when dailies were actually held standing up in the office. Back then it seemed to me that this was the right management style. I built my first projects the same way.

But many years ago I gave up Scrum completely in my teams. What’s more, over time I almost stopped coming across startups where Scrum is used in its classic form at all. Many distributed teams are gradually moving toward an async approach with a minimum number of calls. I gave up calls altogether. If someone has a problem, they write to me right away. If they want to discuss something with the team, they write in the team chat. I can’t even imagine a task or question that can’t be discussed over text.

When I join a new startup, I have to spend a lot of time convincing the owners that the team can work without calls. No matter how many reasons I give, the calls are almost always kept. Usually, if the founder lives on calls themselves, they want everyone else to live on them too. But in the rare cases when I’m allowed to manage a team without them, everyone responds positively to it. In all that time, I’ve never met a single person who sincerely wanted more dailies, syncs, and meetings.

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I'm tired of AI-generated answers

Orchid Files — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:46:00 +0000

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

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Saved by chance

Orchid Files — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:12:09 +0000

If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve had that moment when you almost lost everything, but somehow didn’t. You accidentally deleted your customer database, but a backup you’d only just set up saved your business. You sold an asset the day before it surged in value, but the exchange canceled the trade because of an error. You could have lost your life, but an incredible confluence of circumstances saved you. None of us would have trouble recalling a moment like that.

What changes a person more: losing something important or keeping it by sheer luck?

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Multilingualism in startups

Orchid Files — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:19:58 +0000

When launching a startup, don’t make it multilingual until you have stable revenue and a team to support it. You can’t know whether the startup will become profitable, so early on, your time is better spent finding PMF and acquiring users. AI can write scripts to manage translation files and help with text translation, but the quality will still be poor. Users might as well use the browser’s built-in translator.

If you build the service in 10 languages right away, you’ll struggle to maintain it. Every interface change means updating translation files across all languages, even though most of your users will likely understand an English interface anyway. But if you’re building for a specific country, build it in that country’s language and don’t add English. Even two languages at the start are worse than one. With a single language, you can keep text directly in the code instead of splitting it into separate translation files.

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Typical AI conversation

Orchid Files — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:45:17 +0000

— Why did my last post on X get 0 impressions? Is it a shadowban?
— It’s not necessarily a shadowban. First, X shows the post to a small group of followers, and if there are no reactions, it doesn’t push it any further.
— So it showed the post to 0 people, got 0 reactions, and didn’t show it to anyone else?
— Yes.
— But if there were 0 impressions, how could there be reactions?
— Maybe the stats just haven’t updated. Try posting this from another account.
— The stats haven’t updated in 2 days? Why would I post it from another account?
— You’re right. I got sidetracked. Going back to your original question. First, X shows the post to a small group...

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Millionaire

Orchid Files — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:27:43 +0000

You start out wanting to become a millionaire. Then you become one and realize you’re just one of a million people just like you. You’re not special, you’re no better than anyone else, you’re not even one in a thousand. You’re one in a million.

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Urgent advice from AI

Orchid Files — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:59:20 +0000

I once asked Composer 2 to add support for a third-party API in the code. I was so lazy that I just dropped the token into the chat and gave it the task. It replied in bold “This is urgent. You sent the token in the chat. Revoke it right now”. At least it wasn’t in all caps. It didn’t even try to do the task. No other model has ever talked to me in that urgent tone, like some cheap marketing gimmick. Of course, I didn’t bother changing the token.

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Apostrophe and quotes

Orchid Files — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:10:00 +0000

American style uses double typographic quotes “ ”, British style uses single typographic quotes ‘ ’, and technical documentation uses straight quotes " ". In American style, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks; in British style, placement follows meaning. But even in American blogs and technical books, punctuation is often placed by meaning rather than inside.

The apostrophe is either straight ' or typographic ’. For articles and posts, the typographic apostrophe is recommended. But if you look at popular news outlets or blogs from large tech companies, you’ll often find straight and typographic apostrophes and quotation marks mixed even within the same article. Some AI agents can’t use typographic symbols and replace them with straight ones.

Straight quotes are always easier to type than holding 3 keys for typographic ones. On top of that, with straight quotes the opening and closing mark is the same character, while typographic quotes use different ones. Smart auto-replacement to typographic symbols can be set up on a laptop, but most apps ignore that setting. If you write in different languages or for different styles, smart replacement will not help. You can set up a script to replace them before publishing articles, but if the article contains code examples, you can’t replace them there. You can also replace them manually before publishing, but when replying to comments you end up with straight ones again. Some fonts render the straight apostrophe beautifully, but you control the font only on your own site. Some websites automatically convert typed text into typographic marks, but if you paste text, they leave the straight ones in.

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Startup success probability

Orchid Files — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:47:00 +0000

Statistics say that 90% of startups shut down in the first few years. But this only applies to venture-backed startups. Startups with other kinds of funding may have a 50% chance of success, and your own odds may be even higher.

If you’ve already launched 5 startups, even if all of them shut down, your next startup will have better odds of success than someone on their first startup. And if some of your startups became profitable, your next startup will have better odds than someone whose 5 startups all lost money. With each new attempt, you improve your odds of success.

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Incommunicable experience

Orchid Files — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:46:00 +0000

You can read all you want about psychedelic states, panic attacks, or being drunk. But no description can convey what they actually feel like. Only by experiencing something like that yourself do you realize how big the gap is between merely knowing about it and actually feeling it. And how hard it is to find the right words to describe those sensations.

How do you explain to someone who’s never had a dream what dreaming feels like?

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I haven’t finished a single project 100%

Orchid Files — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:17:00 +0000

Right now I have over 10K tasks written down across all my projects. If I completed one task every day, it would take me 30 years to complete all of them. But when I do a task, I get new ideas and write down a few more new tasks. My task list will never end. The number of tasks in it only grows every day.

Writing down a task doesn’t mean I have to do it. It just frees up mental space. When I write something down, I don’t spend time assigning priorities or deadlines. An idea comes up, I save it to a file right away, and I’m done thinking about it.

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The best is yet to come

Orchid Files — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:11:00 +0000

The most profitable project of my life hasn’t been built yet.
My most viral post hasn’t been written yet.
I haven’t met the most wonderful person yet.
I haven’t come up with my strongest idea yet.

I believe that the best is yet to come, and that the best of the past will eventually stop being the best. That’s why I keep working on new projects, even if my current ones are at their revenue peak. I keep writing new essays, even if a recent one brought in the most readers. This helps me avoid getting attached to past successes and makes it easier to handle setbacks.

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