From the moment I stepped into her car, something was different. The dashboard was tidy, and a tablet was mounted behind the driver’s seat, flashing games and ads for passengers. Curious, I struck up a conversation.

"That’s an interesting setup," I remarked, gesturing toward the tablet.

She grinned in the rearview mirror. "Oh, that? It’s from a program called playoctopus.com. Passengers can play games, see ads, and if they interact, I earn points—sometimes even cash. It adds up to about $100 extra a month. Plus, there’s a digital tip box—makes it easy for people to show appreciation."

Impressed, I asked about her car, an electric vehicle. She dove into the details. "The manufacturer claims a range of 275 miles per charge, but I consistently get about 300."

I raised an eyebrow. "How do you manage that?"

She leaned in, her eyes sparkling with pride. "Battery hacks. Little things—like optimizing charging habits, managing the climate control and using factory resets. Most people dont realize, but I’ve found settings that keep the car comfortable and save battery. I learned it all from the manual—something 95% of owners never bother to read. Those extra 25 miles a day? Over a year, that’s a huge difference."

Numbers rolled off her tongue effortlessly. She explained how every small tweak—whether it was maximizing her car’s efficiency or finding new ways to earn during rides—added up over time. It wasn’t just about making more money; efficiency was a philosophy that touched every aspect of her life.

As the ride drew to a close, I realized I’d received more than just a lift across town. In just twelve minutes, she’d demonstrated how an efficiency mindset in one area naturally spills over into others. Tiny optimizations, when practiced consistently, compound into significant results—whether in business, personal finance, or even a simple cab ride.

The Scoring System

The hackathon's scoring system had an intriguing twist: while we could score projects from 1 to 5, we were explicitly forbidden from using the middle score of 3. At first glance, this might seem limiting. However, this simple constraint turned out to be a brilliant mechanism for better decision-making.

Why Eliminating the Middle Ground Works

1. Forces Clearer Decision-Making

When we have a middle option, it often becomes our safety net—a comfortable refuge when we're unsure or want to avoid making a definitive choice. By removing this middle ground, we're compelled to lean one way or the other, leading to more thoughtful decisions.

2. Reveals Our True Inclinations

Without the middle option, we're forced to confront our actual preferences. If you can't choose 3, you must decide: is this project closer to a 2 or a 4? This process often reveals that we actually do have a slight preference one way or the other—we just weren't acknowledging it.

3. Produces More Actionable Feedback

In the context of the hackathon, this scoring system resulted in more meaningful differentiation between projects. But think about how this applies to other scenarios: performance reviews, product feedback, or even personal decisions.

Applications Beyond Judging - Scaling questions

One powerful application of this principle is in scaling questions. When gathering information or feedback, instead of using a traditional 1-5 scale, you can employ a forced-choice scale that eliminates the middle option.

For example, when asking team members about project satisfaction, using a 1-2-4-5 scale forces them to lean either positive or negative, revealing underlying sentiments that might otherwise remain hidden behind neutral responses.

Real-World Applications of Scaling:

1. Customer Satisfaction: Force clear feedback by using 1-2 (improvement needed) or 4-5 (satisfactory), eliminating neutral responses that mask real issues

2. Employee Performance: Transform reviews by requiring clear stance on skills and achievements

3. Product Features: Make decisive roadmap decisions by requiring stakeholders to either prioritize (4-5) or deprioritize (1-2) features

4. Team Feedback: Drive actionable insights by compelling managers to provide clear positive or constructive feedback

Implementation in Survey Libraries or Survey Making Websites

Modern survey and feedback libraries should consider incorporating this concept through thoughtful implementation. Developers can provide configuration options to disable middle-scale values and support custom scale ranges that skip middle values (like 1-2-4-5). Additionally, offering pre-built templates with forced-choice scales and including analytics that compare results between traditional and non-neutral scales can help organizations better understand the impact of eliminating neutral responses.

Final Thoughts

While it might feel uncomfortable at first, eliminating the middle ground in our decision-making processes can lead to clearer thinking, better outcomes, and more honest feedback. Sometimes, the best way to make progress is to remove the option of staying neutral.

What areas of your life could benefit from eliminating the middle ground? The next time you find yourself gravitating toward a neutral option, try forcing yourself to lean one way or the other—you might be surprised by the clarity it brings.

I spent the day to engaging with participating teams, exploring their project motivations and discussing potential technological approaches for implementation. It was fun day interacting and understanding diverse perspective of individuals. The event began with a LlamaIndex tutorial and team formation, followed by a six-hour hacking time. Teams were given three minutes to present their final work within final hour of the event.

Here are my three takeaways from hackathon:

1. The gap between ideas and prototypes is closing really fast: I was amazed to see quality of prototypes teams have created within 6 hours. This includes ideation, planning, prototyping and deploying.

2. Every team’s focus on viability of idea developing into an actual startup: Most of the ideas were novel and pragmatic. Teams focused on hacking a viable prototype that has path to bring it to customers. Some teams also digged and presented metrics on market share and their potential business model.

3. Varied background brings diverse perspective: With participation from working professionals, each participant had unique insights to share and perspectives on the problem statement, exposing each individual to novel challenges that had not been previously considered.

Here are some of the ideas teams worked on:

• InsightHire: This project assists recruiters and hiring managers by analyzing job descriptions and resumes to identify candidate strengths and weaknesses. It employs four agents—Job Description Agent, GitHub Agent, Resume Agent, and Scholar Agent—to generate comprehensive candidate profiles.

• My Privacy Diary: An AI-powered privacy analytics tool that transforms your browsing data into meaningful insights about your digital behavior. Using advanced LLM technology (GPT-4o), it analyzes your browsing history to provide a comprehensive overview of your online activities.

• [Winner] The trending-laughs project is designed to generate humorous content based on current news trends. It utilizes APIs from NewsAPI, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs to fetch news articles, process them for comedic potential, and produce audio outputs of the generated jokes.

• [Winner] Presence.ai enables users to create a digital version of themselves by cloning their voice and crafting a personalized AI agent. Users upload personal information and voice recordings, allowing the system to generate an AI that responds to questions in their unique voice, based on the provided data.

• RoamReader is an interactive chatbot designed to analyze and discuss a user's location history. By processing data from Google's Semantic Location History, it enables users to engage in conversations about their past movements and activities.

• CharacterAiChatbot is a project that appears to involve AI-driven character interactions, as suggested by its name

• [Winner] SocialServicesNavigation is a web application aimed at assisting users in navigating social service resources.

Apologies for other teams whose amazing work I cannot cover in this post.

And here is photo with one of the winners:

If you want to get connected with Open Source AI community, defintitely consider attending one of the upcoming events here: https://lu.ma/oss4ai

For those familiar with Wunderlist, it played an essential role in my approach to managing tasks. Following its acquisition by Microsoft, I smoothly shifted to using Microsoft Todo. This transition was straightforward. Although Microsoft removed some functionalities after rebranding Wunderlist as MS Todo, they introduced the “My Day” feature, which enhanced the user experience with its intuitive design.

When you put MS Todo side by side with other task management applications like Todoist or TickTick, it’s clear that MS Todo falls short in terms of features. Despite this, I’ve continued to use MS Todo for its simplicity. Over time, I’ve entered over 6000 tasks into the Microsoft Todo app. Moreover, the effort and time required to adapt to a new task management app are substantial, and in my view, the cost of switching and habit formation doesn’t justify the benefits. However, it appears that Microsoft’s focus isn’t so much on developing MS Todo as a standalone application but rather on enhancing its integration within the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

In my automation workflows, I frequently utilize IFTTT and Zapier to capture tasks into the MS Todo Inbox. For several months, I’ve been dealing with a persistent bug in MS Todo that seems to have gone unnoticed by many MS Todo users and their integration partners. This issue came to my attention while setting up an IFTTT Applet and using “Create task in task list” MS Todo action. Despite having more than 20 task lists, it only displays the “Flagged email” task list for me. At first, I suspected the problem was with IFTTT, so I contacted their support team. However, after a month of back-and-forth communication, we still didnt reach conclusion.

I noticed similar issues with Zapier and when using the MS Todo Alfred workflow. This made it crystal clear that the problem lies with the Microsoft Graph APIs themselves, rather than with their client-side implementations.

My curiosity piqued and I started going through their API documentation. It appears that Microsoft offers two similar APIs for retrieving all Task lists: List task lists and Get task list delta. The former appears to be more definitive, while the latter is preferred for clients that wish to stay synchronized with the server to enhance performance. To examine the API responses, I utilized the Microsoft Graph Explorer to make calls to both APIs. Below are my findings:

List task lists API

Request

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/todo/lists/

Response

{
"value": [

		{
		"@odata.etag": "dummyTag",
		"displayName": "Flagged Emails",
		"isOwner": true,
		"isShared": false,
		"wellknownListName": "flaggedEmails",
		"id": "dummyID"
		}
	]
}

Even though I have 20+ lists in Microsoft Todo, it only gets me “Flagged Emails list”. This is a bug

Get Task Lists API

Request https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/todo/lists/microsoft.graph.delta()

Response

{
	"displayName": "Flagged Emails",
	"isOwner": true,
	"isShared": false,
	"wellknownListName": "flaggedEmails",
	"id": "dummy"
},

{
	"displayName": "Tasks",
	"isOwner": true,
	"isShared": false,
	"wellknownListName": "defaultList",
	"id": "dummy"
},

{
	"displayName": "List A",
	"isOwner": true,
	"isShared": false,
	"wellknownListName": "none",
	"id": "dummy"
},

{
	"displayName": "List B",
	"isOwner": true,
	"isShared": false,
	"wellknownListName": "none",
	"id": "dummy"
}

This correctly displays all my lists in MS Todo. I’m uncertain whether the Delta API was recently introduced or has been available since the beginning. However, it’s clear that the initial requests from the list taskLists API and the list taskLists delta API follow different patterns.

I found only a single mention of this problem online. Microsoft has yet to notice the issue, which negatively impacts the user experience for some customers. One reason this problem might have remained under the radar is that it primarily affects power users who have multiple task lists, numerous tasks, or have been using MS Todo for an extended period. Regular customers with minimal use of MS Todo are not affected by this issue.

Microsoft doesnt expose easy way to submit bug reports for Microsoft Graph API. However, I have submitted feedback here in Microsoft Graph portal.

Cascading effect

Incorporating abstractions undoubtedly offers benefits in terms of speed and convenience, yet it also introduces costs related to maintenance and traceability. Within a web of API integrations, a single bug at the system’s core can ripple through to all its clients and, ultimately, impact the business. Furthermore, the cost of diagnosing errors becomes significant when integration partners are in the dark about the root cause of an issue. As a customer, my instinct would be to report a problem to IFTTT, never suspecting that the real issue lies within the Microsoft API itself. When a minor bug occurs in a tool designed for further abstraction, it’s like tossing a pebble into a pond: the resulting ripples extend broadly, influencing not just an individual user but the entire network of those connected to the system.