Judgment

Start with the deskIn the morning you ask it to work. By midday the desk is full: ten pages of draft, eight pictures, a cut video, code that runs. None of the work went away for you. You are not idle at all. Every piece has to pass your eyes. Every piece waits for your nod. The song is about this desk. The four things below all circle back to it.

First · Draw the line: say what it is, and what it is notBefore you start, write two lines. What this thing is. What it is not. One line each, on paper. If you can write them, the line is drawn. If you cannot, do not start yet. It will not draw this line for you. Ask it to add, and it adds — fast, and well. More and more gets piled in, until the thing tries to be several things at once, and nobody can say who should take it over, or which part. That is where it falls over: on rebuild day, all the code runs. What was wrong was that half of it never belonged in this piece at all. So each time you want to add something, ask one question first: is this my stretch of the work, or the next person’s? No answer, no add. If you cannot say which stretch the next person takes, you have crossed the line.

Second · Dare to cut: built is not the same as keptOne word in the Pre-Chorus needs explaining here first. “Cut” here means to rule — like a referee deciding who wins, you decide which piece on this desk stays and which piece goes. The first cut usually lands on something that works. Running is not the same as deserving to stay. You build something halfway, try it, and it feels off: looks fine, useless in the hand. Keep it, and everything after has to bend around it. Cutting takes two things: working experience, the eye that spots a plan flawed from birth; and a real trial, because only trying shows where it chafes. Trials are cheap now, so build it, try it, then cut by what the trial showed. One more rule matters here. When the same fault has been patched a third time, stop. Patch only the surface, and the same fault comes back wearing a different face; by the fourth round you find the directions themselves were colliding. Before you fix anything, sort it: a one-off, or a wrong direction? A wrong direction cannot be patched. A person has to set it again.

Third · Count the cost: the bill outside the codeWho is this made for? Who pays? Answer those before you start. No answer, and the prettiest build is wasted work. The bill has three lines: who it is for, who pays, and who carries the upkeep money from here on. If one line is fuzzy, do not start. There is one more line hiding behind those, and the song could not fit it all in, so here it is in full. The same thing, sold as a subscription or sold outright, and who pays for the upkeep afterwards — that bill has to be counted by you, too. A plain case: a system built for small organizations. Make each one run a heavy setup of its own, and the price will not come down; they cannot run it either. Let the platform host it centrally instead, and the per-unit price finally works. How it is sold and how it is built are two sides of one bill. People who count only the technical bill get stuck at this gate: the thing is built, and nobody buys it — or they can buy it, and cannot keep it running.

Fourth · Make the call: split the work three waysLast comes the split. Take a sheet of paper and divide the work into three piles. One pile you do yourself. One pile you hand to it. One pile never goes out, no matter who is chasing you: deciding. The split is not the end. Over time you collect experience: which jobs it handles well, which jobs fall apart the moment you hand them over. Do not keep that in your head alone; write it into a ledger, and let it bother you with it at most once a day. When the ledger is thick enough, go through it line by line. Which lines earn a place in the rules is your call, with your nod. Nodded, a line goes in and takes effect next round. Not nodded, it does not count. That way it does not grow more self-willed the more you use it, and the rules stay in your own hands — change tools, and they travel with you. The failure here is easy to picture: pushing the pick of styles and the setting of direction back onto the client, and asking them to choose. That hands your most important call to the person least placed to make it; they can spend half a day choosing and still not land on what they wanted. Another version: stuffing a homemade layer of judgment inside the tool. It gets stronger every few months. Your layer goes stale fast.

Four things done, back to the desk: it still does the work. What stays on that desk, what goes, how it is sold, and who decides — those are yours.

Lyrics · “主意我来拿” (original Chinese lyrics, as sung)

VERSE 1 让它写篇稿子，它刷刷写满十页 让它做张图，八张排着队送上来 剪片写代码，样样都不喊累 一上午的活儿，它一杯咖啡的功夫干完

PRE-CHORUS 活儿交出去了，我却没闲下来 一桌子的成果，全等着我来裁 以前拼手快，一天赶出几篇稿 现在比想得清：哪件留、哪件抛

CHORUS 活儿它来干，主意我来拿 它负责出力，我负责想法 干活的手换了，拍板的人没换 它跑得再快，也得我把着关 活儿它来干，主意我来拿 划界——敢删——算账——拍板 划界——敢删——算账——拍板 快不快，它自己心里有数 走得对不对，我得点头

VERSE 2 这东西是啥、不是啥，先得我划界 它只会往里添，越添越没边 做出来、能跑通，不等于就该留 同个毛病补三遍，停下来，想想方向

BRIDGE 代码之外还有账，这账得我来算 做给谁、谁掏钱，只有我心里清楚 做得再漂亮，没人买也白忙 卖给谁、怎么卖，这主意我来拿

FINAL CHORUS 先把活儿分三份，心里列张单 一份我自己做，一份交给它干 还有一份最要紧，谁催也不外包 拿主意的事，留给人来拍板 活儿它来干，主意我来拿 它负责干出来，我负责拿主意 下回开口之前，先问自己一句 这件事，该它干，还是该我拿主意？

Sources for this episode

The concept frame comes from Du Guankui’s talk “After Handing Execution to AI, What Became of Human Work?” (Osaka AI Meetup, October 2026). Only the topic and the frame were borrowed; the lyrics and these notes are original to this site.

Closing question

Take the closing question with you. Next time, before you ask it to start, ask yourself one thing: is this its work, or is this my call? If it is its work, let go and hand it over. If it is your call, lay out that three-pile list in your head first, then speak.

Process note

The four words in the chorus — draw the line, dare to cut, count the cost, make the call — blurred together in every take; sung at speed, you could not tell which four they were. So the finished film puts the four phrases on screen one at a time, lighting each one as it is sung, with the captions matched word for word. What the ear misses, the eye catches. We picked this recorded version because its delivery of the definition line, “活儿它来干，主意我来拿” — let it do the work, I make the call — is the steadiest of the takes. That line matters most in this song, so it had to be unmistakable on first hearing; where something had to give, we protected that line first.