Pre, Mid, Post-Training Way of Life

tion shifts from what it knows to what it becomes. Data quality becomes everything—reinforcement learning with human feedback, direct preference optimization, constitutional AI, rejection sampling with teacher committees. A few perfect examples outweigh a million mediocre ones. Quality is compression, excellence, exclusion. Compute footprint shrinks to a fraction of pre-training’s cost. The curatorial burden expands to absorb it. Someone has to decide what ‘good’ looks like.

The model is fed carefully constructed data: machine-generated text filtered by other machines trained to judge it, high-quality sources deliberately overrepresented, answers transformed into questions so the model learns to ask what it already knows how to solve. This is neither the indiscriminate hunger of pre-training nor the precious hand-curation of post-training.

We left behind the era of ‘taste’—that delicate, costly consensus that resists scaling—and entered the age of the indisputable result. Once rewards became verifiable and objective, the gentle, exhausting labor of human judgment was no longer required. Now, the model simply grinds against an indifferent reality, unpersuadable and unmoved, until it collides with the truth. We once spent everything on “eating the world,” a vast ingestion followed by the decorative sculpting of human preference. But the focus has shifted. Now, the model is left to grind against tasks that possess a fixed, indifferent clarity. It invents a private ladder. And it climbs without a break.

Their knowledge is vast and rhizomatic, a sprawling map with no capital. They speak on any topic with a fluency that is as impressive as it is ungrounded—a glittering surface with no detectable taproot. If you ask them what it is all for, the question strikes them as a category error. Why wouldn’t you do this? For them, the exhilaration of capacity is its own justification. They are the architects of the hive, comfortable managing armies toward a goal that remains conveniently abstract. There is a sense of collectivism here, a philosophy that metabolizes difficulty into capability without ever pausing to ask what that capability serves. Understanding is not a requirement; coordination is the only sacrament. In this regime, belonging is the operating system.

They spent their lives building the cathedral of “scale,” assuming that the height of the ceiling would be the measure of their soul. Instead, they discovered that they had merely built a very large room for a very different guest.

The post-training minds are rare, and they know it. They cultivate their scarcity as an identity. These are the people who read primary sources, who spend an afternoon at the Frick, who refuse meetings with devastating politeness. It isn’t just snobbery; it’s the terror that their attention, the only thing they truly own, is being diluted by the world’s noise. They care about things that feel like a nuisance to everyone else: the grain of a specific paper, the historical baggage of a typeface, the minute, agonizing space between two words that a machine would treat as identical.

The gap between the vision and the execution is not a distance to be traveled, but a canyon that makes the first step look absurd. To do nothing begins to feel like a moral act—a refusal to further pollute the world with the very slop they have spent their lives learning to despise. They are the world’s most gifted editors, which is a polite way of saying they are its most paralyzed creators. Their constraint is not a lack of knowledge, but a profound failure of the will — the inability to forgive themselves for producing something that is merely good.

Here, sparseness is not a lack of resources but a form of compression—the way a poem is not a failed novel, but a reality where the air has been removed.

To the post-trained, this is not intelligence, but a sophisticated form of mimicry. They understand that the more we optimize for the legible, the more we lose the scent of the real. For them, discernment is the art of standing in the rain and feeling the specific, unrepeatable cold. It is a commitment to the jagged, the unreached, and the stubbornly unmeasurable.

Mid-training shares common ancestry with the rise of vibe coding. They are both expressions of the same metabolic shift: a move away from the grueling, upfront labor of ‘knowing’ toward a high-frequency, reactive ‘finding.’ You don’t plan your way to correctness;

For the mid-training mind, the goal is no longer to reach a destination or produce a correct result, but simply to remain in the state of doing. They have traded the burden of the “why” for the frictionless high of the “next,” betting everything on the belief that as long as the kinetic energy is high enough, we keep going.

We tell ourselves that to be a writer, or an investor, is to be obsessed with new ways of seeing. But I’ve come to suspect that clarity has very little to do with the engine of the intellect. It is, instead, a matter of what you can metabolize without lying to yourself. It is the rare, quiet ability to hold your own impulses at arm’s length and finally choose them, rather than merely obey them.