The One Reader I Keep in Mind
Every so often, in the middle of writing a post, the hand stops. Underneath the pause there is the same question: who is this for?
How far to open up a technical term. How much background to assume. Decisions like those, stacked one on top of another, are what give a text its texture. And when the answer to "who is this for" moves between one decision and the next, the whole thing reads crooked on the way back through.
So the fix was to pin down one specific person and leave him there.
He goes by Kenji, which is a placeholder name. Early thirties to early forties. Comfortable with technology — high IT literacy, in the sense of being used to handling the tools. The picture is someone running systems at a small or mid-sized company, or an in-house IT engineer — the person who manages and operates the systems a company uses internally — or a freelance engineer, or a developer at a startup. A team of three to ten people, somewhere in there.
The AI part has already started. ChatGPT, Claude, tried out on real work. What has not settled is what happens once several AI tools are running at the same time: who manages what, and how.
"If the AI botches something, who ends up responsible?" "Where does the go or no-go call get made? The line is vague and things keep moving anyway."
Questions along those lines are probably sitting somewhere in his head, or so I'd guess. No clear answer, and the thing keeps running regardless.
Day to day, the guess is that it probably sounds more like this.
"I want to hand work over to an AI, but I am afraid of it running off on its own." "I want some kind of checking mechanism, and I do not know how to design one." "Separation of powers, here meaning dividing execution, audit, and approval between separate agents, applied to AI — in Japanese, that is not easy to find written up anywhere."
What he wants out of this blog is probably not the clean theoretical account but the record of something actually being run. Where it broke. How the repair was designed. An implementation log that includes whether or not it held, and out of that, the feeling that he could pull off something like it himself. Which is probably the honest version of what he is after.
Pinning the reader down is really a way of keeping the writer from drifting. The words change depending on who is reading: whether to draw the design up as a diagram, where to put the gloss, how much shared background to assume. Making those calls fresh every time means the hesitating never ends.
"As long as it reaches Kenji" is a fixed point, and having one makes the call faster. Settling on a reader profile is less about narrowing the audience down than about holding the writer's own judgment steady — closer to that, I think.
When the reader I have in mind stands in for what readers want, what belongs in a piece gets easier to see. Build the thing so it follows whatever Kenji would want to know next, and the order sorts itself out. For now that is how things are arranged here.
Kenji is a construct I designed on this end, and not everyone who reads is going to fit him. Someone younger, hoping to become an engineer, might read it as a door into trying this out one day. Someone in management weighing an AI rollout could well read it as: if this is the kind of design that keeps failures from landing, maybe there is something in it for us. And someone whose background looks nothing like Kenji's will sometimes take it somewhere else entirely, I think.
Any of those seems fine to me.
If it turns out someone unaccounted for was reading, that is its own finding. It becomes material for the next design.
The Kenji profile is a reference point for deciding things as a writer. It was never a sign on the door telling everyone else to stay out.
