Context: Post #8 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption.

When you finish something, you learn something about how you did that thing. When you finish many things at the same time, you do not get to apply the lessons you learned from each of those things to the others. This insight, turns out, was non-trivially a core cause of the industrial revolution.

The assembly line is one of the foundational technologies of modern manufacturing. In the platonically ideal assembly line the raw ingredients for exactly one item enter a factory on one end, and continuously move until they emerge as a fully assembled product at the other end (followed right by the second item, the third item, and so on). This platonic assembly line has indeed been basically achieved, even for some of humanity's most complicated artifacts. A Tesla factory converts a pile of unassembled aluminum and some specialized parts into a ready-to-ride car in almost exactly 10 hours, all on a continuously moving assembly line that snakes itself through the Gigafactory.

• If at any point we discover a fault at any step in the assembly we immediately halt the line, preventing [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 18th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NytNporGkzzvyxJZC/small-batches-and-the-mythical-single-piece-flow

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.