Stop Doing Easy Things
The article discusses the distinction between easy and simple tasks, emphasizing that easy tasks can lead to superficial productivity without meaningful outcomes. It highlights how generative AI can make easy tasks even easier but often fails to achieve true simplicity. The author urges readers to stop focusing on easy tasks that result in repetitiveness and waste.
- ▪Rich Hickey defined the difference between easy and simple in his 2011 talk 'Simple made easy'.
- ▪Easy tasks can inflate productivity metrics but do not necessarily lead to significant achievements.
- ▪Generative AI enhances the ease of tasks but rarely contributes to achieving simplicity.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 29 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ The one thing successful companies are doing with AI — The Hill
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Smart laziness |
| Canonical URL | https://xendo.bearblog.dev/stop-doing-easy-things/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 07:53:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T08:07:36.528Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T08:07:36.528Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YtzWEzfRX0s- · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Stop doing easy things 25 May, 2026 In 2011 Rich Hickey in his seminal talk "Simple made easy" defined the distinction between Easy and Simple. Easy is something that is approachable, can be done quickly and without effort. Simple, on the other hand, is something that is not convoluted, something clean and straightforward. It's sometimes very difficult to make something simple. The raise of generative AI pushed this concept even further. LLMs make easy things even easier, but they rarely produce simplicity. Doing many easy things quickly can inflate 'productivity' metrics and give a dopamine boost, but it's unlikely to deliver something amazing. Easy by definition is something that anyone can do. Easy leads to repetitiveness, duplication, waste. Stop doing easy things.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Smart laziness.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Smart laziness
