Tagged: product-building

Thorsten Ball:

But here’s the very important bit, the one bit I want you to take with you into this week: there is no way in hell, absolutely zero chance, that you can build something new and avoid bumping into “that’s not what I meant”, or “now that I’m working on it I’m not actually sure”, or “hmm, now that I use it, I don’t like it”. Because the only way you could avoid that would be to fully specify what you want up front and, well, guess what programming is? It’s fully specifying what you want. You can’t avoid it, because you can’t define it yet, because building software is learning!

What exactly you do doesn’t matter as much as constantly asking: how can I get feedback on what I’m trying to build as soon as possible? And “feedback” here is used in the widest sense possible. Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes: feedback from the CI system on main, feedback from colleagues, feedback from users, feedback from you once you actually use it.

So good. So, so good. Recommended reading.

The quotes may make it sound obvious: who doesn’t agree with “get early feedback”? But it is one thing to intellectually understand it, and a totally different thing to feel it viscerally.

As I started reading this, I was thinking that we at udaan do this almost as a habit; even the business folks think & act this way, not just the tech team. But as I finished reading and reflected, I felt that no, we don’t actually do enough of it. We can do more, we can do better, and this is one good way in which AI can enable us.

John Gruber:

Wireless networking is pervasive too. But Apple doesn’t have “a killer wireless networking product”. Wireless networking simply pervades everything Apple makes. I’m hard pressed to think of a single product Apple makes that doesn’t use some combination of Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth, and proprietary wireless protocols. There was a time, not too long ago, when Apple didn’t make a single product with wireless connectivity. Now it’s pervasive in all their devices. That’s more what AI is going to be like. There’s not going to be one “killer AI device”. Everything is going to be an AI device, to some extent, just like how everything today is a wireless connectivity device, to some extent.

I have been arguing AI is a technology and not a product for a while. While wireless technology is a good analogy in the context of a hardware company like Apple, a much more widely applicable analogy would be database (or more generically, storage) technology.

There is hardly a product out there which does not use a database in some form. But we don’t call them “database products” do we? As AI matures, I believe we similarly won’t call every product that uses AI an “AI product”.

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.

Andrew Sharp:

And that's ultimately Cook's legacy, to me. He made sensible choices under the circumstances, nurturing Apple profits and its stock price at every turn. If many of those choices were ultimately predictable and unfulfilling, well, that's the game for a company at Apple's stage of the corporate life cycle.

Where Apple under Jobs was selling performance and possibility, Apple today capitalizes on our collective dependence on the iPhone ecosystem and promises superior reliability to any peers. And that's still a pretty good deal! But it's a categorically different value proposition than that of the company that was changing the way an entire generation interacted with technology.

This is the best commentary I've read in light of the announcement of Cook's retirement. Most of the other coverage has been way too positive, this is much more balanced and closer to how I feel.

Vicki Boykis:

What makes good engineers good at product design is the same thing that makes them good at engineering. They feel for the boundaries of what the code and the product allows them to do and stop at those boundaries.

Another name for being able to understand and plan for affordances, either through good product intuition, or experience, or both, in the real world is mechanical sympathy.

I agree with the assertion that agentic coding tools don't have mechanical sympathy. At least as of now; maybe the future models will overcome this (but maybe not).

Michael Bloch:

I'm more bullish on AI than I've ever been. And that's exactly why I'm bearish on most software companies. Not because their customers will leave, but because their next thirty competitors just got a lot easier to build.

I've seen/heard a bunch of different people quip exactly this. This is one of the crispest articulations. Rings ominous to me.

Kerrick Long:

Many people will tell you to ship a minimum viable product. Others say to ship a prototype to get feedback. Not me. I think you should ship a blank page to your production servers on day one.

Notice how much is involved in shipping software that does nothing. This work will come around eventually. The later you do it, the riskier it is.

Not satire. Good food for thought.