60 · Craft — MOC

Up: plan

Temperament > talent. The meta-skill no one teaches directly. The section most likely to make or break the transition.

Mindset shifts (engineer → researcher)

• It runs ≠ it's true — a green pipeline means the code executed, not that the result is valid ⚠️
• Healthy paranoia — distrust your good results most; too-good-to-be-true almost always is
• Experimental equanimity — went well? great. went poorly? also great. Both are information.
• Beginner's mind — engineering priors are sometimes the trap; hold ideas loosely
• Do things other than research — walks, distance from the keyboard; aha moments don't come at the desk

Workflow discipline

• Fast iteration beats parallelism — short cold-starts, tiny fast evals; context-switching is the enemy
• Beware coding-agent dragons — agents silently shorten prompts/seq-lengths/configs; small eng errors are grave science errors
• Don't over-engineer the research infra — build the minimum to iterate + reproduce, not a cathedral ⚠️
• Gruntwork is the job — hundreds of hours of unglamorous labeling/filtering behind every good result

⚠️ The traps checklists — run these before trusting any number

• Leakage checklist — temporal/target leakage; split by user & time, never by row
• Offline→online checklist — does the lift survive an A/B test? is the offline metric a faithful proxy?
• Predict vs cause checklist — does the business want to predict or change the outcome?
• For-profit tension checklist — real research, or incremental engineering relabeled?

Scorecard (the change in reflex)