Write for Yourself

This post is adapted from an internal memo I sent the team at Hex last week.

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking - Leslie Lamport

Before making a hire at Hex, we ask a Lead to write up a brief Hiring Thesis. It’s a pretty short thing, explaining why the candidate is exceptional and deserves one of the limited seats on our little boat. It gets sent to their Lead and myself, and we have a chance to ask some questions.

These kind of procedural steps can feel like a chore. And, inevitably, I’ve heard murmurings of people saying “I have to write a hiring thesis for Barry.”

I get where this is coming from, but I want to share the truth: the doc isn’t for me. I may be an audience for it – but the real utility of the document is for the Lead themselves. And even then, the point isn’t even the written artifact, rather it’s the thinking behind it.

Why write?

If you watched me writing this email right now, you’d see me typing on my keyboard: adding, deleting, editing, and rephrasing. But what you’d really see me doing is thinking. Writing is really just giving structure to your thoughts. As Joan Didion put it, “I write to find out what I am thinking.”

The act of writing requires you to grapple with and organize your ideas, and separate the wheat from the chaff. It forces precision; without it, your thoughts can feel coherent, but often aren’t fully formed or internally consistent. And by writing down your thoughts, you can observe for yourself whether they’re any good.

It’s not infrequent for me to sit down to write and realize that I don’t have my thoughts sorted out! I have an enormous graveyard of abandoned docs that served only for me to wrestle with and discard a bad idea.

In fact, I have literally sat down to write job specs and hiring theses and decided not to pull the trigger. In one case, I had already indicated to the team I was going to move forward with a candidate, sat down to write the thesis, and realized… I didn’t buy it. It would have been easy to skip this! I'm busy. No one made me do it. But writing saved me from what I’m sure, in retrospect, would have been a bad hire.

And of course in the positive case, writing when your thoughts do make sense can be euphoric. It can build conviction, from seeing the strength of your ideas manifested. It can build clarity, from editing the bad bits. And it can lower anxiety, from putting the scary stuff in black and white.

All of this is why I am glad that we have historically had such a strong writing culture. As an example within EPD, the prevalence of feature specs RFCs helps build clarity and confidence in our ideas. At some level these documents are for an audience, to get their buy-in on an approach – but the first and most important reason is for the author to deeply consider the subject themselves.

AI as a bicycle vs. a crutch

Of course the 500B parameter elephant in the room is AI; the ability for LLMs to write compellingly creates a real dilemma.

There’s something amazing about giving an agent a scrap of a thought, and seeing it generate prose. It can feel clear, cogent, and even seem creative. And of course it's much easier than extruding the thoughts out of your own brain.

Let's be honest: who amongst us hasn’t occasionally delegated too much writing (and therefore thinking) to a machine? It can be be tempting. I’ll confess there have been times I’ve been both delighted and disturbed at how I use AI. I find myself having ChatGPT or Notion’s agent take cracks at things and it’s helpful but… in some cases it’s more like I just skipped a workout. It’s easier, but I’m worse for it.

This is a fundamental – even existential – question we all must navigate: are we being quietly robbed of our ability to think? To be weird? Are we going to be separated into "writes and write-nots"?

The question is about what level of abstraction you want to live at, versus what you’re delegating down to agents. For something like a strategy doc or hiring thesis, I might use an AI to organize notes, do research, or even push back on some of my ideas. It can be an amazing “bicycle for the mind”.

But ultimately, I try to embrace being the one writing it out in “longhand” – because in doing so I’m able to actually think, be creative – and therefore be human.

Clear communication is evidence of clear thinking

So, going back to hiring docs: this is why I want you to want to write job specs and hiring theses – for yourself.

Imagine if someone came to you saying “I want to spend $250k”. It’d be reasonable to ask some basic questions. What for? What do we expect to get? Why did we choose this vs. alternatives? And if someone couldn't be bothered to write that down - nay, if they hadn't bothered to write it down to think through it for themselves - that would be concerning.

And all the more if that money is for a living, breathing human with aspirations and obligations. The decision to hire someone is a weighty one, and deserves at least a modicum of time to think it through. The point of the hiring thesis isn’t about checking a box - it's the receipt demonstrating that you've thought it through.

This applies to all of you, whatever role you are in, even if you're not hiring people. We are a heavily builder/IC-driven culture, and every day there are many decisions being made by individuals across the org – and I hope you can all find a moment to write, reflect, and think as you figure them out. Maybe you never share the document with anyone. Maybe it just serves as your own mental gym, forcing you to do reps with an idea and get strong.

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I hope you’ll take the time to write something today, but don't do it for anyone else! Write it for yourself; think it for yourself.