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.
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.
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.”
> The creation is complete when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.
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 :)
Right, I think Brooks means “the act of creation” here, rather than “the product of their creation”.
That is an interesting way to look at it. Thanks!
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.
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
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.
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.
I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective.
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!
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.
> I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work.
Couldn't agree more. It does reflect many of the values of what an ideal product should be based on the developers' experience.
> 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.
"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. "