↗ 3 Constraints Before I Build Anything

3 Constraints Before I Build Anything ↗

Jordan Lord:

These are the 3 constraints that I use before I start building anything. I'm a believer in constraints as an enabler for creativity. Constraints help us collapse the search space, and figure out innovative solutions to problems.

I've been a builder for 10 years, and I've built products that went nowhere because they were either too complex or had no identity. These are the constraints that I landed on after making those mistakes.

I tend to agree with the author — constraints breed creativity and all that jazz.

I find the second constraint fascinating in particular: “The core tech must be separable from the product.” I’ve been thinking about this in the context of product ideas I’m constantly exploring.

For example, Pi, my favourite coding agent and daily driver has this: the pi-ai package which is similar to Vercel’s AI SDK (abstract access to various models & providers) and pi-agent-core (built on top of pi-ai and provides common constructs to build an agent). OpenClaw is built on the latter, and that played a big role in making Pi popular.