When More Parts Make the Bike Worse
Grease on my fingers, I kept adding gear parts to a bicycle, sure it would climb better. Instead the chain slipped and the ride wobbled on flat ground. Building a picture-finder can feel like that bike, stacking more layers and expecting it to get smarter.
On the workbench I saw it. The chain now had a longer, fussier path, brushing past more spots where tiny misalignments could pile up. A very deep picture-finder can act the same way, getting worse at learning than a simpler one, just because the stack is hard to tune.
So I changed the rule. Each new gear section didn’t have to create the whole motion from scratch. It only had to add a small correction to the motion already coming through, and if it had nothing useful to add, it could stay out of the way.
I gave the chain a plain bypass route that kept the old drive line working, while the new gear section sat alongside it. That’s the same trick in the picture-finder: a shortcut carries the old signal around the new chunk and gets added back in. Takeaway: keep a safe path, then improve in small nudges.
Sometimes parts didn’t line up, like when I changed wheel size and the bypass didn’t quite match. I used a simple spacer, or a small adapter gear only at that change. In the picture-finder, the shortcut can also use a simple matcher, but it stays plain most of the time.
With the correction-style build, I could add many sections without the bike becoming impossible to tune. To keep it from getting heavy, I used compact sections that narrow the work, do the main push, then widen again. Deeper builds kept improving, though on small jobs they could still cling too tightly to the practice.
Out on rough streets, the bike held its line because each section made small steady corrections instead of fighting the whole ride. Picture tools can work that way too, not only naming what’s in a photo, but also finding where it is in the picture. I realized the contrast: more parts used to mean more wobble, and now more parts can mean more control.