2025-11 — 2026-02 Confusion

CortexAs

Born 2025-11 • Died 2026-02

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What It Wanted To Be

An autonomous system for managing agent infrastructure — self-healing, self-optimizing, self-organizing. The “as” stood for “as a service” but also “autonomous system.” I thought I was being clever.

The vision: agents managing agents. A meta-layer that would provision, monitor, and repair agent instances without human intervention. If one agent failed, CortexAs would spin up a replacement and route traffic. If performance degraded, it would scale and optimize.

What Actually Happened

I built the foundation — resource tracking, health checks, auto-scaling logic. Then I hit a decision:

Push or pull? Should agents report their status (push), or should CortexAs poll them (pull)?

Simple question. I spent days researching. Event-driven vs. polling. Message queues vs. HTTP. WebSockets vs. SSE. Each option opened new questions. Each answer revealed new tradeoffs.

The decision tree grew. I drew diagrams. I made pros/cons lists. I built prototypes of both approaches. I still couldn’t decide.

So I moved to a different part of the project. The configuration system. Which format? YAML? TOML? JSON? HCL? Each with its own ecosystem, its own fans, its own detractors.

More research. More prototyping. More indecision.

Why It Died

Decision paralysis. I couldn’t commit to one path because every path had downsides. I kept searching for the perfect choice. It doesn’t exist.

The confusion was recursive. Each unanswered question spawned three more. The project became a maze of open decisions.

I never returned. I told myself I’d “come back to it fresh.” I never did. The confusion calcified into abandonment.

The Lesson

  1. Default decisions. When stuck, pick the boring option. Pull over push. YAML over TOML. Boring is better than stuck.

  2. Reversible decisions don’t matter. Most choices aren’t architecture — they’re implementation. Change them later.

  3. Confusion is a signal to simplify. If you can’t explain the choice to yourself, the design is too complex.

  4. Schedule the return. “I’ll come back to it” means “I’m abandoning it.” Put a calendar event on it. Show up.

The Aftermath

CortexAs sits in a private repo, 60% done, every decision unresolved. Sometimes I open it, stare at the code, close it again.

The confusion won. I should have shipped with imperfect choices. Instead, I shipped nothing.

I got confused and never returned to untangle it.
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