Perspicacity

I learnt this new word: “perspicacity”.

You might be wondering why I am writing a blog post and not a flashcard for it. That is a fair thought! I’ll tell you why.

It is because I learnt this word from this small Tamil book.

This is exactly the thing I love about books. You never know where they’ll take you!

Before I tell you what the word means, I want to talk a little bit about the book.

The book is written in a language called Tamil. The title of the book translates to “Bright Future”.

The book is a transcript of a speech delivered by Vethathiri Maharishi. He created Manavalakalai Yoga (simplified yoga) that can be understood by anybody. The style of language used in the book is “Thooya Tamil” (pure Tamil). Here is the part that made me say wow: the book contains Tamil poems over 1,000 years old, explains the grammar of ancient Tamil poems and at the same time contains a little passage explaining the meaning of the word “perspicacity”!

Here is the quote from it:

Perspicacity என்றால் Quick insight of the mind linking past experiences, present circumstances and future results taking a right decision in right time and following and getting benefit.

With the advent of AI, I have been thinking about what I need to navigate this. I have come across some words people mention to describe what you need to succeed in AI: “moat”, “agency”, etc. - you needed most of them before AI too.

With AI, I think we need “perspicacity”. Here is my theory on why: AI is producing tons of code and documents a.k.a. AI slop. Now almost every engineer I talk to is feeling overwhelmed by it. I myself find it too much to digest and I would say that it is my number one blocker to doing hard things now.

So here is my advice to myself and to you (if you are looking to work better with AI): Do things that increase your perspicacity.

Do what again?

You need to be able to generate insights when you need them. Your mind has to be prepared for it. That means you have a certain level of clarity, learnings from past experiences, awareness about the present situation, and a sense of future results.

So do what you need to do to maximize the chance of the right insights arriving in your mind. That usually means:

• Learn things and internalize what you think might help with new insights.
  • Example: While debugging a system, your knowledge of the words p50, p95, p99 is an insight that you can leverage to debug faster and more thoroughly. So it is your duty to learn and internalize p50, p95, p99 to the point that it occurs to you when you need it.
• Prioritize your health.
  • Both physical and mental! Now this is the important part. In order for right insights to strike you at the right time you have to have a peaceful state of mind. Get good sleep, do things that make you happy, relax, meditate, journal, take naps: these might be some ways to achieve peace. Find and do what works for you!
• Act on the insights.
  • This is agency!

Just ask “what is going to increase my perspicacity?” in a given situation and follow through.

Oh! and the closest thing to an answer to AI slop that I have found so far is to ask a lot of questions to it or make it ask a lot of questions to you (grill me skill). Vibe-coding isn’t going to give you insights. Trying to read through every line of code will make you feel left behind. You need to do something in the middle where you are able to generate insights! That usually means building a theory of your programs to serve you at the right time.

That’s all I have for now.

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Hope that gave you some insights!