Classic product management issue. Users ask for a faster horse, actual solution is a car. A response in that direction to the very real issues could have been a really great community moment but 🤷‍♂️ I get the annoyance on both sides.

From a game design perspective this seems easy to correct. Reduce creature count, make their trigger zones smaller, give the user back stun that lasts a reasonable length of time, create a reusable deployable distraction, there's so many options that don't involve adding a BFG.

You can manage most creatures with distraction flares and health packs which I did early game, but by the time I'm 400 meters down in my underwater spaceship this doesn't make in game sense. This is the actual problem. The solutions aren't reusable. Creatures are just a tax.

Once you have the repair gun and a tadpole pod you can easily deal with them but your forced into a jump out get the thing repair the pod jump in loop. Everything becomes about minimizing time outside the pod. Before you get those things your only resource is consumables.

In the new game the creatures, especially past clearing the first bloom, are incredibly annoying and a bit immersion breaking. They are clustered around game objectives and resources, attack constantly, often from afar, but don't really threaten the player. Annoying not fun.

I never bothered to kill a Leviathan because it's very possible to just sneak around them which is really fun and makes you feel like a badass because it's pure skill and knowledge that makes it work.

The few creatures in the first games that you can't learn to avoid triggering you have the stasia rifle for. This is perfect because it stuns them for a meaningful period and you get a lot of shots out of one battery. If you play cleverly you rarely need it.

The new game is great but the balance really is off with the creature interactions. The fun of the first game is continuously being terrified of these scary creatures and then discovering yet mostly leave you alone if you know how to handle them.

This has a clinical name. Revenge bedtime procrastination. And the ADHD version runs on a completely different mechanism than the neurotypical one. A neurotypical person stays up late because they want more leisure time. The ADHD brain stays up because it spent every drop of dopamine it had on executive function during the day. Sitting in meetings, managing transitions, filtering impulses, remembering the thing you were supposed to remember. That burns through dopamine the way sprinting burns through glycogen. By 10pm the tank is empty. But here's where it gets counterintuitive. The exhaustion is physical. The dopamine deficit is neurological. Those are two separate systems. Your muscles want sleep. Your prefrontal cortex is starving for the stimulation it was denied all day because it spent 14 hours on task-switching and impulse control instead of anything that actually felt rewarding. The phone at midnight is the brain trying to collect what it's owed. Low-effort, high-stimulation content. Scrolling, short videos, rabbit holes. The exact profile of activity that delivers dopamine without requiring the executive function you already depleted. The sleep researchers call this a "self-regulation failure." It's closer to a debt collection. You borrowed against your own reward system to function all day. The bill comes due at midnight. And the brain will not let you sleep until it gets paid.

Teaching in the age of LLMs: I failed 4 students, for the first time ever. I also gave more A 's than ever before. In previous years, students realized after the first or second HW that they weren't in Kansas anymore and needed to work hard. No more. Just solve it with LLMs. But then the midterm arrives, and they can answer 0 of 40 questions. Do they reform their ways? Nah, they just decide to "give up" on class, assuming they'll get a B, or a C, or whatever, because they submitted HW and got decent grades on those. And never before have they encountered a professor who will dare fail them. The flip side is that the most "agentic" students now have the world's best tutor at their disposal. They deeply understand the material and aced my (intentionally very difficult) exams. As if we live in "The Diamond Age". Inequality galore. From my vantage point, "the permanent underclass" appears to be about agency, not assets.

As a founder you must resist all the things that make you feel successful without actually making the company successful. -raising big rounds you don’t need -Saying yes to every podcast, panel, and networking dinner -hiring a big teams without PMF -getting a big office Etc.

has a second-order effect: speed of execution was always the constraint. Now it's speed of deciding what to execute. That shift changes everything about how orgs need to be structured.

order effect here: we solved the 'can AI do the work' question. The 'does anyone know what it did and what should happen next' question is wide open.

Speed of execution went to infinity. Speed of deciding what matters didn't move. That's what we're building Dotted around — the AI harness for orgs running on agents.

ng; the agentic one is no different. Dotted's roll-up = status updates that write themselves: trydotted.com/learn/roll-up

30 agents is one problem. Knowing what they did across an org is the harder one. That's where we're building Dotted — the AI harness around the org.

Dotted around — the coordination layer when the team:agent ratio inverts. Curious what your tax looks like once you cross 20 agents. Worth comparing notes.

g: more agent output, less org understanding. Tech isn't the blocker — synthesis is. Dotted's roll-up automates that: trydotted.com/learn/roll-up