kuniga.me > NP-Incompleteness > Atomic Posts

Atomic Posts

15 Aug 2026

I’m using the term atomic post in reference to the concept of atomic habits. The idea is for posts to be as narrow as possible in scope, while still being self-contained.

Like with atomic habits, the idea is to lower the bar for posting in hopes of posting more often. I mentioned before the desire to write shower thoughts more often and that:

I still need a forcing function to make such posts, because otherwise I keep waiting until I have enough to write about them and it never happens.

In software development we strive for functions to be modular: short but also conceptually self-contained and with the right level of abstraction, so that they can be more easily reused. For posts, the same idea applies, but the ‘reuse’ is so that I can reference the idea in other posts and avoid repeating the same argument over and over.

A new motivation for doing this is that I started using LLMs to find connections between posts and it sometimes surprises me. My expectation is that the more content I have out the higher the chances of interesting connections.

I’ve set up some methodology to help with this. I keep Google docs for several topics I want to write about and whenever I read or think of something related, I add it to that document (this very post had a corresponding doc!). Whenever I find I have enough ideas collected, I will post them.

I’m also trying to be more deliberate on what non-ficcion books I read: I’ll pick topics I already plan to write about instead of random ones that happen to seem interesting to me at the time. The first example of this is Elbow Room by Daniel C. Dennett, since I’m interested in sharing my ideas on free will.

Once I have the notes, it should take me, ideally, less than an hour to finish the post. This way I don’t have to find a large block of time to write it. I won’t worry about being comprehensive, because I can always go back and edit the post.

Related Posts

In On Memory I described keeping book notes in Google Docs, but I’m gradually shifting to adding the notes under the a topic I’m interested in instead. Only when it’s something I hadn’t thought about or thoughts on the book/writing itself do I keep under the book note.

As early as 2021, in Writing Posts I mention I keep post drafts in Google Docs, but I do that when I already started the process of writing the post, while the new process is at an earlier stage, during ideation.