Something I've been thinking about a lot is that ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste. Even with humans, each of us has different values, intent, and taste, although we do share many of these things. As a living human being, you have biological or cultural desires and particular goals that you want to accomplish while you're alive on this earth.
When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.
When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.
Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.
It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.
> it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities. So each product becomes a collection of abilities, without actually having unified point of view.
This is a a very good and succinct summarization.
What I'm also observing recently also is that pretty much every product tries to expand to do things that completely different products used to do, and become a mega-product-for-everything. It's like a Zawinski's Law on steroids.
I enjoyed the introduction. I just picked up “The mind of the Maker” by Sayers, which Fred Brooks cites in The Mythical Man Month: “ Dorothy Sayers, in her excellent book, The Mind of the Maker, divides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction. A book, then, or a computer, or a program comes into existence first as an ideal construct, built outside time and space, but complete in the mind of the author.” He goes on to say how the user meets the mind of the maker in the interaction: “The creation is complete
when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the
program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.”
I work on a FLOSS data center management framework. 13 years ago, while at the office preparing to configure a new server, I had a flash of insight seeing the entire data center managed by such a tool. I saw it complete in my head. And since then, I'm still working towards that goal, that I'll never really reach.
I’ve found myself raising the bar every day with my team in terms of my expectations of what their deliverables should be. I gave them enough time to adjust but I observed that the average engineer believe they can do the same with less effort while they should rather think about delivering more and of higher quality, and taking the extra time available to connect the dots.
I believe this is going to be a huge filter moving forward.
This is why I really hope that we don't end up in the world that a lot of AI pilled people believe is the future: one in which chatting with the AI drives everything and interface basically goes away. While I don't think that it is impossible that we at least go partially down this path it would make me incredibly sad.
Well thought out and built software is so satisfying to use that I would be very sad to see it go. Particularly given that the current crop of frontier labs don't really seem to care that much about the craft and feeling of software (at least relative to their other priorities.
Fantastic take. I always thought so, but couldn't express it so well. After reading the first paragraph, my heart flickered. This will be the only determining thing in the age of AI - someone who shapes the things based on its own intuition and taste, based on experience. I did that a lot in my IT carier leading a bunch of projects. I care about each of them, deeply.
I thought so too, makes you fuzzy and stuff inside. I wonder if this person behind X template is limited to software though? Curious if we can feel the aura of the sweatshop workers' "experiences, perspectives and hopes and dreams" while using our smartphones and gadgets. It's nice to think about, isn't it? AI couldn't replicate these intangible and difficult-to-quantify delights.
This age will be brilliant for sorting between those who care about "done" as in "technically complete" vs "done" as "creates enduring value for the person on the other end of it". AI largely only does the former.
Using AI is really not different from hiring a bunch of people to do your project. You can tell them to do the minimum it takes to make it work or you can tell them or do it according to a long term vision you have and set high standards.
I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.
In so far as "unless you specify precisely how the user interaction should work, you will get bad design" that's true, but that takes you far from the vision of "give AI a prompt, it will provide you with usable output with minimal human intervention".
Claude is better because it validates its work visually and seems to have a more intuitive sense of what makes an interface pleasant to use.
Codex manages to be both rigidly literal about the spec but also prone to adding unnecessary explanatory text, helper elements and visual clutter, oddly like a 1990s ERP system.
The role of product manager/product design is literally to turn whatever is being asked for into the optimal solution someone would actually want to use - it's this translation instinct that is missing from AI.
This is everything not just software. Although a lot of what we wear, eat and drink come from factory, if it didn't, you can always tell the someone behind it. Handcrafted things easily have more value and I find myself thinking more about it only after it affected what I did daily (software). Since Industrial revolution, countless things have gone to the factories. Makes me think how little we really empathize as humans.
I don't think the distinction the article makes is between handcrafted and mass-produced. "Software factories" is just the name we gave to these slop machines recently, but it's been the same with teams that churned out features without thinking much beyond the requirements. When it comes to physical items, factories can be set up with care and handcrafted items can be churned out without any.
I strongly agree with this take. And in particular, I've been wondering about this:
> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently,
> each operating a small software factory.
>
> [...] together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster
> rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
Do solo developers consequently have a bit of an advantage today when it comes to producing tasteful, opinionated software?
yeah, i think so. it has always been the case that having a single mind build something from start to finish gives it a level of cohesion and uniqueness that is hard to do with one or more teams. it's just been really hard to build fast/good enough to actually ship. Now, that's completely doable with one person as long as they don't relinquish too many decisions to their AI agent.
> Recently, many products are starting to feel messy to me, including products from very successful companies.
Well .. I'd love for AI to vanish ... but ... that statement is also wrong.
It insinuates that prior products are all great. I think this is not universally true. Take GTK. I think gtk2 is better than gtk3 which is better than gtk4 (and gtk5 will be wayland-only). But none of them, individually, was really that great to begin with. QT also feels just way too huge - I get that you get a lot of functionality, but to me it often feels as if these toolkits aren't that great. And the competitors are often worse. This is not solely confined just to the code that powers them, but documentation as well. The gtk4 documentation is a total joke. I learned more about GTK3 from the python examples by the way, which were well documented - I think lazka (Christoph Reiter) wrote or at the least organised most of that (for python-gtk3). Barely anyone seemed to want to use python-gtk4, so that part also could be seen in the documentation being worse for a long time (I have not checked this in the last some months, but back when I checked it, it was that way, it almost seemed like 100x more users of python-gtk3, and even that became a slow dying breed ... evidently the www took a huge toll on the traditional GUIs).
Give two different people the same problem, and you'll likely get two different solutions shaped by differing experiences and ways of thinking. I think software is an example of this manifested.
A practical problem with the intuition approach is that you have no possible way to measure two people’s intuitions against each other. In smaller organizations that’s fine, but anytime you get larger you can’t weigh the intuition of 50 people against each other
While that is a challenge, I think the author does a good job explaining that intuition is more than “good vibe”. It is a coherent understanding. And luckily, coherent understanding is by its nature also easier to transfer. For example, because someone with coherent understanding will teach the same ideas over and over. That is not to say that it will necessarily win over incoherent ideas, but it is recognisable.
I (think I) agree with the author, but I want to point out that his core grievance has little to do with AI software factories.
> The product changes are primarily additive... I think the reasons for this is that it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities.
This is perhaps the biggest difficulty in Product, and the core of the Innovator's Dilemma. Changes or removals, fundamentally, fuck with how somebody uses your product. It is very, very rare to ship a feature - something that inspired somebody in Product, got all the internal stakeholders to sign off, including getting leadership to fund it - and have nobody use it, so that it isn't controversial to remove it; even then, removing it competes with resources for adding something else, so it's still controversial to remove it. When somebody uses something that you fucked with, you risk them churning, that simple.
Coming up with good features to add is not hard. Everybody and their grandma has ideas. A simple spreadsheet can count which ones are most popular and are proposed most often. This should not, in and of itself, dictate what you build next, and bad Product leadership looks like following mass diktat.
Good Product leadership is not afraid of the consequences of fucking with the user. Good Product leadership has both the courage to reformulate the offering and gets the reformation right, because they intuitively understand the user, the domain, and where they sit in it, better than anyone else. They ship stuff that fucks with you because they understand the difference between the bad kind of being fucked with, and the good kind. And if you churn, then you churn. So be it. You can't actually make everyone happy all the time, so focus on making happy the people who get it, and accept losing the rest. That's also easier to say when you have $100k in ARR with $1k ACV, compared to $5m in ARR with $2.5m ACV.
Good Product leadership is rare because good leadership is rare. AI has nothing to do with it.
Good Product leadership is rare because Product rarely uses their own product.
I can count on one hand the number of PMs in my career who understood the platforms they worked on outside of their extremely narrow domain - and even then that narrow specificity was often a distorted lens that came from the customer interviews they did that they remembered or found evocative. And this just gets worse the further up the chain you go.
Engineering knows that the best way to improve a product is to dogfood it. Nothing beats regular lived experience long enough for the human brain to start its pattern recognition. But nobody wants to eat their own dogfood, they want the kibble from another brand that has all the shiny marketing attached.
If I had my way, I'd stick PMs into shadowing sessions with Support on the regular for sentiment analysis. No relying on Support management to relay upwards trends - there's far too few Support managers worth their salt.
As with most creative pursuits, the best things happen when there's a clear point of view.
Unfortunately, the best things aren't always the most commercially successful, because products are only a small part of what makes a company successful. I think we're seeing this play out in the software market.
JIRA might be objectively awful, but it still manages to print money!
In his book Programming as Theory Building, Peter Naur viewed programming not as the act of generating source code, but as the act of building a theory about the problem and its solution.
He said the lifecycle of a program ends when the development team is disbanded or when knowledge transfer fails to happen. But these days, people develop with AI. Will that knowledge actually remain? There's a slightly tircky point here
Of course, even in the past, once a codebase got big enough, everyone was writing code on top of an incomplete theory. But when you delegate work to AI, the theory itself isn't yours anymore, which makes it even trickier.
I’ve recently given a talk on R&D in the time of AI and based it on Naur’s essay for exactly that reason.
While it is in some sense harder, there are also opportunities, because the reach of a person is bigger and one can refactor more frequently to align with the theory being developed without the cost that used to be associated with this. AI is also effective for producing materials to teach the theory, increasing the chance that others can contribute coherently to a product.
I tend to think of this “character” as part of craft, bordering on art.
Deep artful craft requires inhabiting work beyond basic professionalism and requirements. You set aside self and ego and commit yourself as a tool to create.
It’s a value system created via example and culture. We have to be ready to prioritize reflection and learning, meaningful feedback, dialogue, certain kinds of humor even.
So it’s sadly not healthy or sustainable in many settings.
Edit: thank you for this post. It was a nice humanist reaffirmation.
"You will love this next piece of software. Completely hand-made. Each line of code, each piece of the visual design, was carefully and artisinally crafted by a real human, using techniques passed down for generations between craftsmen. Some of those techniques survive in books like Code Complete and such. They don't make 'em like this anymore. "
> I wonder whether some of this comes from how the work is organized. Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
Well... when you look at the org chart of many companies, the answer is obvious. Either there is no person responsible for anything at all, and everyone works for themselves, or there are dozens of little fiefdoms, competing for budget, staff and anything else.
But it's rare these days to have one person or even a committee that actually takes responsibility for a product as a whole and most importantly has a joint, shared and agreed-upon vision: how should the product look like, what should the product accomplish and how should the product be architected?
it's rare but that's why apple under jobs, Tesla/SpaceX under musk, stripe under Patrik (and Collison), Shopify under Tobi, Basecamp under DHH, CF under Matthew, NV under Jensen are so successful.
And then on the opposite side we have companies like VW, Microsoft and other craps who are constantly going downhill because there's no person behind the products.
> we have companies like VW, Microsoft and other craps who are constantly going downhill because there's no person behind the products.
I wouldn't mind if they accepted they are building utilities so that there's no need to reinvent the wheels every quarter. Windows 7 was pretty much done. Just add small amount of features (like wsl) over time, but they had to butcher it to add metro. It's like reinventing pry bars and concrete blocks.
The two forces driving this are personal competition + ambition and external market subservience.
Working software gets remade because 'delivering' a project, which includes both development and marketing, looks good on resumes, not because the users want it.
If there are quarterly reports there has to be Number Go Up growth.
The net result is enshitification, with income models that rely on exploitation and forced lock-ins, not on voluntary mindshare attracted through quality.
UX-first software that isn't the result of corporate infighting, and isn't automatically aligned with corporate values, still exists in niche boutique developer spaces, but not so much elsewhere.
The biggest issue is that AI changes none of this from the top end, but may change it from the bottom up. If vibe coding becomes more popular bought/subscription options will first be replaced by DIY vibe coded custom tools with some longevity, and eventually by compute soup which improvises tools on request.
Unfortunately, "building utilities" is something the stonk markets really do not like.
Pension funds and insurances? Sure, they love stable stock that predictably pays dividends and doesn't move around much. They have giant amounts of money they need to keep safe and utilities have a captive client base with low risks, while also having a predictable expenses schedule, and price increases of suppliers can trivially be passed downstream to the consumers. That's true for classic utilities - power, gas, phone, internet - and for "software utilities", stuff like SAP or, at least in the past, IBM.
But the general stock markets? They have been driven rabid by unicorns making return rates that are completely unreasonable. Everyone is just chasing the next hype. One day it's crypto, one day it's NFTs, one day it's cloud computing, next day it's AI. And Microsoft decided during the cloud computing heydays to finally enter that fray... and that was when shit went down hard.
Linear is an unusual enterprise company in that it carries the consumer ethos of caring for design, and the user. This is what's absent in the product-by-checklist enterprise companies, whose economic buyer often has the same mindset.
When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.
When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.
It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.
How do you know that? AI is also software. Who controls that software?
Plus, AI picking up data from real human means they will also incure bias aka "taste".
This is a a very good and succinct summarization.
What I'm also observing recently also is that pretty much every product tries to expand to do things that completely different products used to do, and become a mega-product-for-everything. It's like a Zawinski's Law on steroids.
From the user's perspective, sure. Or when a particular product or version ships, then it's "done" as far as that version is concerned.
But from the maker's perspective... nothing will ever be complete. Even in the most meta sense possible.
Philosophy is fun :)
I believe this is going to be a huge filter moving forward.
Well thought out and built software is so satisfying to use that I would be very sad to see it go. Particularly given that the current crop of frontier labs don't really seem to care that much about the craft and feeling of software (at least relative to their other priorities.
I thought so too, makes you fuzzy and stuff inside. I wonder if this person behind X template is limited to software though? Curious if we can feel the aura of the sweatshop workers' "experiences, perspectives and hopes and dreams" while using our smartphones and gadgets. It's nice to think about, isn't it? AI couldn't replicate these intangible and difficult-to-quantify delights.
I agree that with AI it's very tempting to throw together a bunch of code without any thought of the longer term. But a lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans that produce well written code following the highest standards. That is just not true.
Claude is better because it validates its work visually and seems to have a more intuitive sense of what makes an interface pleasant to use.
Codex manages to be both rigidly literal about the spec but also prone to adding unnecessary explanatory text, helper elements and visual clutter, oddly like a 1990s ERP system.
The role of product manager/product design is literally to turn whatever is being asked for into the optimal solution someone would actually want to use - it's this translation instinct that is missing from AI.
Well .. I'd love for AI to vanish ... but ... that statement is also wrong.
It insinuates that prior products are all great. I think this is not universally true. Take GTK. I think gtk2 is better than gtk3 which is better than gtk4 (and gtk5 will be wayland-only). But none of them, individually, was really that great to begin with. QT also feels just way too huge - I get that you get a lot of functionality, but to me it often feels as if these toolkits aren't that great. And the competitors are often worse. This is not solely confined just to the code that powers them, but documentation as well. The gtk4 documentation is a total joke. I learned more about GTK3 from the python examples by the way, which were well documented - I think lazka (Christoph Reiter) wrote or at the least organised most of that (for python-gtk3). Barely anyone seemed to want to use python-gtk4, so that part also could be seen in the documentation being worse for a long time (I have not checked this in the last some months, but back when I checked it, it was that way, it almost seemed like 100x more users of python-gtk3, and even that became a slow dying breed ... evidently the www took a huge toll on the traditional GUIs).
> The product changes are primarily additive... I think the reasons for this is that it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities.
This is perhaps the biggest difficulty in Product, and the core of the Innovator's Dilemma. Changes or removals, fundamentally, fuck with how somebody uses your product. It is very, very rare to ship a feature - something that inspired somebody in Product, got all the internal stakeholders to sign off, including getting leadership to fund it - and have nobody use it, so that it isn't controversial to remove it; even then, removing it competes with resources for adding something else, so it's still controversial to remove it. When somebody uses something that you fucked with, you risk them churning, that simple.
Coming up with good features to add is not hard. Everybody and their grandma has ideas. A simple spreadsheet can count which ones are most popular and are proposed most often. This should not, in and of itself, dictate what you build next, and bad Product leadership looks like following mass diktat.
Good Product leadership is not afraid of the consequences of fucking with the user. Good Product leadership has both the courage to reformulate the offering and gets the reformation right, because they intuitively understand the user, the domain, and where they sit in it, better than anyone else. They ship stuff that fucks with you because they understand the difference between the bad kind of being fucked with, and the good kind. And if you churn, then you churn. So be it. You can't actually make everyone happy all the time, so focus on making happy the people who get it, and accept losing the rest. That's also easier to say when you have $100k in ARR with $1k ACV, compared to $5m in ARR with $2.5m ACV.
Good Product leadership is rare because good leadership is rare. AI has nothing to do with it.
I can count on one hand the number of PMs in my career who understood the platforms they worked on outside of their extremely narrow domain - and even then that narrow specificity was often a distorted lens that came from the customer interviews they did that they remembered or found evocative. And this just gets worse the further up the chain you go.
Engineering knows that the best way to improve a product is to dogfood it. Nothing beats regular lived experience long enough for the human brain to start its pattern recognition. But nobody wants to eat their own dogfood, they want the kibble from another brand that has all the shiny marketing attached.
If I had my way, I'd stick PMs into shadowing sessions with Support on the regular for sentiment analysis. No relying on Support management to relay upwards trends - there's far too few Support managers worth their salt.
As with most creative pursuits, the best things happen when there's a clear point of view.
Unfortunately, the best things aren't always the most commercially successful, because products are only a small part of what makes a company successful. I think we're seeing this play out in the software market.
JIRA might be objectively awful, but it still manages to print money!
He said the lifecycle of a program ends when the development team is disbanded or when knowledge transfer fails to happen. But these days, people develop with AI. Will that knowledge actually remain? There's a slightly tircky point here
Of course, even in the past, once a codebase got big enough, everyone was writing code on top of an incomplete theory. But when you delegate work to AI, the theory itself isn't yours anymore, which makes it even trickier.
While it is in some sense harder, there are also opportunities, because the reach of a person is bigger and one can refactor more frequently to align with the theory being developed without the cost that used to be associated with this. AI is also effective for producing materials to teach the theory, increasing the chance that others can contribute coherently to a product.
Deep artful craft requires inhabiting work beyond basic professionalism and requirements. You set aside self and ego and commit yourself as a tool to create.
It’s a value system created via example and culture. We have to be ready to prioritize reflection and learning, meaningful feedback, dialogue, certain kinds of humor even.
So it’s sadly not healthy or sustainable in many settings.
Edit: thank you for this post. It was a nice humanist reaffirmation.
Couldn't agree more. It does reflect many of the values of what an ideal product should be based on the developers' experience.
Well... when you look at the org chart of many companies, the answer is obvious. Either there is no person responsible for anything at all, and everyone works for themselves, or there are dozens of little fiefdoms, competing for budget, staff and anything else.
But it's rare these days to have one person or even a committee that actually takes responsibility for a product as a whole and most importantly has a joint, shared and agreed-upon vision: how should the product look like, what should the product accomplish and how should the product be architected?
And then on the opposite side we have companies like VW, Microsoft and other craps who are constantly going downhill because there's no person behind the products.
I wouldn't mind if they accepted they are building utilities so that there's no need to reinvent the wheels every quarter. Windows 7 was pretty much done. Just add small amount of features (like wsl) over time, but they had to butcher it to add metro. It's like reinventing pry bars and concrete blocks.
Working software gets remade because 'delivering' a project, which includes both development and marketing, looks good on resumes, not because the users want it.
If there are quarterly reports there has to be Number Go Up growth.
The net result is enshitification, with income models that rely on exploitation and forced lock-ins, not on voluntary mindshare attracted through quality.
UX-first software that isn't the result of corporate infighting, and isn't automatically aligned with corporate values, still exists in niche boutique developer spaces, but not so much elsewhere.
The biggest issue is that AI changes none of this from the top end, but may change it from the bottom up. If vibe coding becomes more popular bought/subscription options will first be replaced by DIY vibe coded custom tools with some longevity, and eventually by compute soup which improvises tools on request.
Pension funds and insurances? Sure, they love stable stock that predictably pays dividends and doesn't move around much. They have giant amounts of money they need to keep safe and utilities have a captive client base with low risks, while also having a predictable expenses schedule, and price increases of suppliers can trivially be passed downstream to the consumers. That's true for classic utilities - power, gas, phone, internet - and for "software utilities", stuff like SAP or, at least in the past, IBM.
But the general stock markets? They have been driven rabid by unicorns making return rates that are completely unreasonable. Everyone is just chasing the next hype. One day it's crypto, one day it's NFTs, one day it's cloud computing, next day it's AI. And Microsoft decided during the cloud computing heydays to finally enter that fray... and that was when shit went down hard.
Yet https://linear.app/Homepage doesn't scroll without jank on mobile.