korrents
Ben Kuhn

Ben Kuhn

@ben-kuhn · 23 positions · On ppll ↗

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

Ben Kuhn did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

3 of Ben Kuhn's claims fit 3 mental models. Most often: Bottlenecks, Everything decays without maintenance, First principles.

Models they name

Their own words name the idea.

Bottlenecks

A system moves only as fast as its narrowest point; speed up anything else and nothing changes.

Used by 91 others

People who can reliably make outcomes happen without oversight are rare and are the real bottleneck on how much an organization can take on at once.

  1. Ben Kuhn Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once. Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net · 19 Apr 2025All korrents from this piece
    People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.

Everything decays without maintenance

Institutions, code, cities and knowledge run down by default; keeping something alive is work that has to be paid for.

Used by 30 others

Neglecting maintenance of infrastructure over time makes it degrade faster and become costlier to repair later.

  1. Ben Kuhn Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave unmaintained infrastructure degrades more quickly, and is more expensive to fix in the long run. Some mistakes I made as a new managerbenkuhn.net · 23 Apr 2023All korrents from this piece
    unmaintained infrastructure degrades more quickly, and is more expensive to fix in the long run.

First principles

Reason up from what is known to be true, not from what is usually done or said.

Used by 21 others

Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.

  1. Ben Kuhn Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker. How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net · 25 Feb 2024All korrents from this piece
    If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.