You
What should a new hire do in week one?
ChatGPT
Ship something tiny on day one, then read. The order matters: a merged one-line fix teaches the whole pipeline, and the codebase reads differently once you have touched it. A week of reading first produces a person who knows the architecture and cannot deploy.
You
You
What do I write down before going on holiday?
ChatGPT
The three things that break, how to tell which one it is, and who to call when it is none of them. Architecture diagrams are pleasant; runbooks are what get used at two in the morning.
You
How do I know when it stops being worth it?
ChatGPT
When you stop noticing it. If it has not surfaced a problem in six months, it is either solved or it was never the bottleneck you thought.