00 — Philosophy

"Beginners are always focused on what you do, but the focus should be more on how much you do." — Andrej Karpathy, Lex Fridman #333

Why this exists

Most "productivity systems" sold to developers are productivity porn — beautifully designed, never used past week 2. They optimize the feeling of being organized, not the output of shipped work or the health that lets you keep shipping.

This system optimizes for one outcome only:

A multi-job dev (backend + Solana/Rust + interview prep) ships consistently for 2+ years without burning out.

Not "optimal." Not "10x." Sustainable.

Three constraints we refuse to violate

Health is non-negotiable. Sleep <6h three nights in a row → all bets are off, see 04-failure-recovery.md. The Van Dongen et al. (2003) data is unambiguous: 14 days at 6h time-in-bed = cognitive performance equivalent to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation, and subjects don't notice. (PubMed)
Effectiveness > efficiency. Doing the right deep work for 90 minutes beats fragmenting 6h into Slack-interrupted chunks. Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule is the foundation: makers need half-day blocks; one mid-day meeting can destroy a whole half-day.
Compound > burst. Naval: "All returns in life — wealth, relationships, knowledge — come from compound interest." A 1h/day Rust habit for 365 days ≫ 12h once a quarter.

Three things we refuse to add

No 50-widget dashboard. Every page exists because it's used daily or weekly. If a metric isn't acted on, it's deleted. Karpathy's karpathy.ai is one HTML page. Aim for that energy.
No gamification. Streaks are for habit visibility, not dopamine. No badges, no XP, no "level up." DHH: "Stop saying ASAP. We get it. It's implied." — same energy: stop manufacturing urgency.
No "track everything" mindset. Anything not actionable is noise. Calorie counting is out. Mood-tagging every hour is out. Sleep hours, exercise Y/N, deep work hours, MIT done Y/N — that's the floor. Everything else is optional.

What this is NOT

Not life coaching. No affirmations, no morning gratitude rituals as a system requirement. If they work for you, fine — keep them in your head, not in this app.
Not Stoic LARPing. Cold showers and 4am wakeups are not in the protocols because the evidence is weak (cold cognitive benefit: Muller 2021 systematic review — 9 of 10 studies showed impaired cognition during/after exposure).
Not hustle culture. 73% of devs report having experienced burnout (JetBrains 2023, corroborated by Tulili et al. 2023 systematic mapping study, n=92 papers). The 4-jobs-at-once dev who skips sleep is the modal burnout case.
Not anti-ambition. The remote Solana/Rust job goal is taken seriously. The system is designed to make it more likely by 2027, not less.

The two-skill operating principles

This codebase was built under two operating principles imported from CLAUDE.md:

Karpathy guidelines — surface assumptions, simplicity first, surgical changes, goal-driven execution.
Research discipline — every non-trivial claim cites ≥2 independent sources; popular claims that don't replicate are flagged.

Apply the same discipline to your weekly review. If a habit "feels right" but the evidence is weak, drop it.