Disposable Engines

Venkatesh Rao's essay (as written here, a personal post) argues that disposable engines, such as rules of thumb, hacks, prototypes and experimental protocols, are underrated and useful for building new fields and ventures. He contrasts them with reusable engines and cameras, which are persistent frameworks or lenses, and argues that mixing up these categories causes problems, citing behavioral economics' replicability crisis as an example. He also suggests that businesses drawing on live information flows rather than stored artifacts, such as LLM tools, are a sign of how knowledge work may change.