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Comment by limmeau | Hacker News Reader

So what about the other improv principles...

"Is my partner having a good time": Make your partners look good. That is usually a good idea in any team.

"Find the earliest end". That would mean don't ever maintain an old product because there's nothing interesting in it...

"Yes and" principle: you accept the ideas that your fellow players introduced and build on top of them. For example, "Backend moved their data store to a novel distributed document store they read about on Twitter -- Yes, And we'll let the frontend run in a JS-emulated Browser-in-a-Browser!". I see that being applied, but I'm not sure it's good advice.

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Analogies work until they don't. They're a tool break down concepts or to help re-frame a way of thinking. When analogies stop being useful, stop using them. With that being said, I feel like there's some nuance being missed.

"Find the earliest end" is about keeping ideas flowing for creativity's sake. There is only so much mileage out of an idea before it becomes stale (exceptions withstanding [skip to about the 1 minute mark])[0]. The earliest end isn't permanent either. Troupes and groups revisit ideas all of the time.

"Yes and..." doesn't mean that every idea needs to run its course at the detriment of the group. It means to explore the idea to see if it leads anywhere fruitful. If it doesn't, bail. The Office[1] showcases this where Michael pretends to have a gun during an improv group. It ruins the flow of everyone else's idea, because his idea has a clear, expected ending. It's OK to see where a fresh-faced dev's idea might take the project. That doesn't mean they have creative control.

[0]: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/16175...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6wY9OwqJ2A

I see the "yes and" principle being about customer interaction. You never tell your customer they're wrong, you always agree with them and build on what they told you they wanted.

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