Why Open the Door #

“Building in public” is often framed as an audience building tactic: share progress, post threads, collect likes. That is not what this essay is about.

This is about improving thinking inside companies, especially remote ones, by exposing work while it is still messy. Open the garage door not to perform, but to surface assumptions, invite timely pushback, and make it cheap to correct course.

There’s this idea that floats around the “build in public” crowd on Twitter — share your work, narrate your journey, let people watch you make things. It’s solid advice if you’re trying to build an audience. But I’ve never been interested in that game.

What I am interested in: thinking better.

And I’ve found that the fastest way to sharpen an idea is to expose it to other people before it’s ready. Not for the engagement, not for the visibility — but because the moment you write something down for someone else to read, you suddenly notice all the gaps you were glossing over in your head.

Ideas that live only in your head are too comfortable. The brain papers over inconsistencies, makes half baked concepts feel complete. You think you understand something until you try to explain it.

Remote work makes this worse. No hallway conversations. No whiteboard sessions where someone squints at the diagram and says “wait, what happens here?” Thoughts marinate in isolation, optimizing for coherence within your own mental model rather than coherence with reality.

The result? You spend weeks on something, share it, and immediately realize the foundation was shaky. Expensive lesson. Keeps happening.

Here is the mechanism to rely on:

Write something half-formed → Share it → Notice gaps → Refine
              ↑                                          |
              └──────────────────────────────────────────┘

The key insight: sharing is not the goal; sharing is the tool. It is the forcing function that makes you confront what you actually do not understand.

Andy Matuschak puts it well: if you need to be brutally honest when talking to yourself, be brutally honest when talking to others about your work. You cannot craft polished narratives about “great progress” without closing your eyes to what is actually happening.

So flip it. Focus publicly on the confusing parts, the frustrating bits, what is not working. This creates a feedback loop that rewards honesty over performance.

How to Work with the Door Open #

Inside a company, building with the garage door up doesn’t mean posting updates to LinkedIn. It means:

• Weekly updates even when there is “nothing to update.” Struggles and blockers are the update. The absence of progress is information. Share it.
• Rubberduck channels. Pick a Slack channel and think out loud. Not polished proposals, raw problem decomposition. “Here is what I am stuck on, here is what I have tried, here is what does not make sense yet.”
• In progress looms, not just finished demos. Record yourself working through a problem. Let people see the false starts, the backtracking, the “wait, that is wrong” moments.
• Streams over artifacts. Instead of sharing the final document, share the messy draft with a note: “This does not hold together yet, here is where I need pushback.”

The pattern across all of these: expose work while it is cheap to change direction. Feedback at the messy stage costs nothing; feedback after you have built the thing costs everything.

Two things happen when you share work before it’s ready:

First, writing for an audience forces assumptions to surface. That thing you “just knew” suddenly needs justification. That step you glossed over needs explaining. Making ideas legible to others makes them legible to yourself.

Second, you get feedback when it matters. Most feedback arrives too late, after the architecture is set, after the approach is locked in. Sharing early invites course correction when pivoting is trivial.

There is a deeper principle: you expose holes by producing, not by consuming. You can read all the books on system design, but you will not find the gaps until you try to design a system and explain it. The hole becomes visible when you try to empty your head.

The Trap #

Here is where most people go wrong: they turn this into a visibility game.

The moment you optimize for how updates look, impressive progress, clean narratives, strategic framing, you have lost the plot. You are no longer thinking in public; you are performing in public. Different thing entirely.

The point of opening the garage door is to let people see the mess. If you clean up before they arrive, you are just doing marketing with extra steps.

This is the trap. Someone reads about “building in public” and treats it as a career strategy. They post updates calibrated to look good. The manager sees activity, the skip level sees output, everyone is impressed.

But the thinking does not get sharper. The ideas do not compound. You are not exposing the vulnerable parts, the confusion, the dead ends, the “I have no idea if this is right.” It is a highlight reel, and highlight reels do not generate feedback that matters.

The goal is not visibility; it is truth seeking. Open the door so people can wander in and tell you when the table saw is set up wrong, not so they can admire the workshop.

When you commit, when you share the half formed thoughts, the confusion, the blockers, a few things happen:

Ideas compound faster. They are exposed to friction early, while still moldable. Instead of hardening in isolation and cracking on contact with reality, they are shaped by input from multiple perspectives.

You build trust in ways polished updates never achieve. People can tell the difference between performing competence and genuinely working through hard problems. Honesty about what is broken signals engagement with the work, not perception management.

And thinking improves. Not because you are smarter, but because you have removed the hiding spots. You cannot gloss over gaps after telling someone “I do not know how this part works yet.” Exposure creates accountability to your own understanding.

The garage door stays open. Not for the audience. For the airflow.

References #

• Andy Matuschak: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zCMhncA1iSE74MKKYQS5PBZ
• Andy Matuschak (related): https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zHV89H7dqnrvNvwXHBSGog9
• Terence Tao: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/write-down-what-youve-done/
• Yasser Elsaid: https://x.com/yasser_elsaid_/status/1912889103219040478
• Steph Ango: https://stephango.com/ramblings