"Refuse to confuse done with good." Katie Dill

@lil_dill writing 'refuse to confuse done with good' on a sticky note, my side projects are not going to like this

@lil_dill Done is a fact about the task. Good is a fact about the person it was for. Before you call something finished, picture the one person who will use it and ask what they'd notice first. If you can't answer that, it's done, not good yet.

@lil_dill Ha, done and good are easy to mix up when a deadline is close.

@lil_dill Writing this on the whiteboard. Shipping fast only works if you come back and make it good.

@lil_dill That one stings a little on a Friday afternoon. Done is a checkbox. Good is whether anyone's still using it next month.

@lil_dill That last pass still needs someone who cares about the details.

@lil_dill With agents this gets tricky, they call it done once the tests are green, and often nobody checks if those tests were any good to begin with...

@lil_dill AI made getting to done almost free, so done stopped meaning anything. The real work is now the extra pass where you ask if it's actually good, and most people skip it because the first draft already looks finished.

@lil_dill In small teams, "done" usually means the task left someone's desk. Write down two or three checks the client would run themselves, and have the person who didn't do the work run them before anything ships.

@lil_dill ship it anyway

@lil_dill Done is a status the team grants itself. Good is a verdict the user hands back weeks later. Most dashboards only track the first, because it's the one we control.

This one hits hardest with agents. They are very good at saying done. The task closes, the checkmark shows up, and nobody looked at whether the output was actually good. What helped us was writing the "good" bar down before the build, as a few checks the agent has to pass, not a vibe.

@lil_dill Needed that reminder tbh

@lil_dill This is Goodhart in miniature: "done" is easy to count and "good" isn't, so the count wins. One simple fix: close the loop after launch. Each shipped item gets a short check against what it was meant to change, and that result counts, not the ship date.

@lil_dill The trap I keep hitting with agents: "done" is easy to define, so it gets checked. "Good" isn't, so nobody checks it. One line on what good looks like before I hand a task off is what keeps the two apart.