Advice worth repeating
15th January 2004
Tim Bray’s Laws of Explanation:
The First Law
When you’re explaining something to somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their problem, it’s your problem.
The Second Law
When someone’s explaining something to you and you’re not getting it, it’s not your problem, it’s their problem.
More recent articles
- My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026
- Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026