Better Boiled Water

One signal 📡 One subtraction ➖ One analogy 🫖

Created by Sam Rogers of Snap Synapse | Episode 16 with cohost Lee Rodrigues | Issue 73 of the weekly newsletter

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🫖 Analogy of the Week: Better Boiled Water

Put a kettle of water on the stove and turn the flame on. At some point the water boils. Leave the flame there or turn the flame up and nothing about the water inside improves. It doesn't get "more boiled," just boiled. The extra heat is just surplus effort for the same result, also known as: waste.

My cohost this week, Lee Rodrigues, calls that threshold the minimum effective dose. "Water boils at a set temperature. When you increase the temperature beyond that, do you get better boiled water?" His first video for a new project took 30hrs. A simpler cut in a different editor took about 4hrs, and they "both achieved the same objective." The judge was his partner Christine, who looked at the polished one and called it "a little AI-ish."

Past the boil, it doesn't matter how much heat, or whose. The kettle can't tell gas from electric, and neither can the people we make things for. As I put it on the show, if the audience "can't tell the difference between A and B, then arguably there is no difference between A and B."

Nobody drinking the tea can taste the burner.

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📡 Signal: Tools change under us

Which matters, because the burners keep changing. When Google folded Gemini into Workspace it also raised Business Standard from $12 to $14 a user a month, landing on annual customers at renewal. The same week, Microsoft put Copilot into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family and raised both by $3 a month, its first consumer price increase since 2013. Nobody opted in, and the only ways out were a downgrade or the door. The tool we chose for one job came back as a different tool, at a different price, with new terms.

It happened to us, too. Our very first livestream failed while the encoder said everything was fine, and every week over the next two months Substack, YouTube, Apple, Facebook, X and LinkedIn each failed us in their own special way. No reason, no explanation, just...no. "None of those were disasters, but every one of them was a dependency on a tool that I didn't own." The one thing that held was the show's own site, built from our git repo, so now sigsub.show publishes first and the platforms link to it downstream.

What protects us isn't picking the right tool. It's where the result lives. "As long as the result lives somewhere that I can own, then swapping the tools out really doesn't cost anything."

Loyalty to a tool is a bet that it won't change, but every one of them will.

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➖ Subtraction: Loyalty to the surface

Drop loyalty to the surface, any tool or platform the work passes through, and keep it for what we're making. "Loyalty belongs to that result. It does not belong to any tool." Lee got there first this week, dropping Final Cut Pro, a tool he taught at the Apple Store for five years, and with it "my loyalty to a workflow that used to work." The same goes for new tools, like the AI tool we kept because we'd already moved everything into it.

So every tool earns its seat with evidence. Does it do this well, here, now, measured against the audience it's for? "Or is it just faster? Is it just shinier?" And one kind of evidence doesn't count at all.

The tool's opinion of itself is not evidence.

Asking a model whether a tool fits isn't running the test, and neither is the vendor's adoption dashboard. Lee's evidence was a spreadsheet of the hours each process took. When he asked Claude to tear the plan apart rather than approve it, it asked where the render time was, and that's how Lee caught the 35 minutes of ingest per webinar he hadn't been counting. That's AI helping us count, not vouching for itself: the second-hole test from Lee's last visit, pointed at the tools instead of the work.

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▶️ Watch, read, or listen

The full conversation with Lee, with the transcript and every format, is at sigsub.show/episodes/ep-016.

Jump to a segment: 30 hours or four · minimum effective dose · every platform changes under us · test and approve, not review · loyalty to the surface · counting the hours

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🧭 Take It to Work

Back in issue 3, I asked what tool we were defending based on yesterday's logic. This one goes underneath, to the loyalty. Issue 68 called the renewal the moment we re-accept the whole arrangement, and a price change is the one moment a vendor has to ask for our loyalty again. That's the moment to ask what the tool has done for the result.

This week's takeaway, Two Decisions and an Owner, runs the same discipline on a single AI-assisted decision:

1. should AI do this at all
2. how much do we check
3. whose name is on it

The tool's opinion of itself answers none of the three.

Which tool did your team keep or adopt this year, and what evidence, other than the tool's own say-so, says it fits? Send me your answer, or bring it to the show.

Next time the flame's all the way up, check whether the water's already boiling. And be careful, it's hot.

Good luck,

Sam Rogers Watcher of Kettles

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Coming up this Wednesday... Next week is our Halloween episode: lightly spooky, entirely real. Attorney Michael Simon is back from Episode 6 to set the AI risk nobody can estimate against the ones that already have a date on the calendar. Set a reminder for the Premiere, and if you're new here, subscribe at sigsub.show so the episode lands in your inbox.

You know at least one person who's defending a tool because it's the one they know. They'd probably appreciate it if you forward this to them right now, right?

Related reading:

• Tool Choice Is Becoming Strategy (003): every tool encodes assumptions about the work, and the subtraction was sunsetting the one that had become a pacifier. This issue asks for the evidence before the sunset.
• Synthetic Trust (025): confident tone standing in for verified reasoning. A tool vouching for its own fit is the same confidence, aimed at the purchase.
• Dig the Second Hole (066): Lee's last visit, and the second-hole test: check both ends yourself before trusting any analysis, an AI's, a vendor's, or your own.
• Every episode's takeaway: sigsub.show/takeaways.

This week's cohost: Lee Rodrigues, at this table since episode one. System2Focus, the performance-support work he and Christine are building, is the one place he asked listeners to go.