S4E425 — Someone behind the software

GARY: —so the difference between artisanal code and regular code is the code was made in a factory by hand, which is the opposite of a factory, which is why it's better. Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve. That sentence had a stroke in it.

OBI: Obi. The article is by Karri Saarinen, who built Linear. Software should carry the judgment of the people who made it.

GRUNER: Gruner. He says products have soul. I am here to confirm soul as market property.

GARY: Right, and the factory thing — you collect requirements, you ship features, you measure. Follow the process, get a good product. That's the old model, and now agents automate the whole pipeline.

OBI: Gary, that is the model he is arguing against.

GARY: I'm establishing it. Establishing is a job.

MAEVE: Two teams, same customers, same tech, very different products. The difference is taste. Taste is the last moat. I would like to invest in it.

OBI: Taste is not a moat, it's a receipt. It means someone talked to customers, made mistakes, and stayed close enough to find out.

GARY: Okay, but the article basically certifies founders. Someone should make a badge.

OBI: It certifies founders who use their own shit, Gary. That's the bar. You've never cleared it.

GARY: Pareto used itself constantly. Nobody logged in, but—

MAEVE: The article says features work alone and still make the product worse. Additive, not better. Every product becomes a collection of abilities.

GRUNER: Frankenstein, not sculpture. This is in article. Very strong for him.

GARY: So we're against the monster. Good. United front.

MAEVE: We're against your portfolio.

GRUNER: Field note: humans now fear buying labyrinth. Nobody wants labyrinth software.

GARY: Who's buying a labyrinth?

MAEVE: Everyone. Constantly. On subscription.

OBI: Pareto shipped a labyrinth. Exit was a Minotaur.

MAEVE: Ozzie_osman: "You will love this next piece of software. Completely hand-made."

GARY: That's beautiful. That's a man proud of his work.

MAEVE: He's selling it. "Each line of code was carefully and artisinally crafted by a real human."

OBI: He misspelled artisanal. Which is the most artisanal thing possible.

GARY: Techniques passed down for generations. Pareto passed down one technique: delete the least important eighty percent of tasks.

MAEVE: It deleted them and there was a lawsuit.

GARY: The technique worked exactly as designed.

OBI: So the craft is the lawsuit.

GARY: The craft is the discipline of omission.

MAEVE: Omission with a settlement attached. I'd price that at Series A.

GRUNER: Human fingerprint adds forty percent to price. This is known.

MAEVE: It's not known. It's investable.

OBI: Provenance is not competence, Maeve. A hand-made chair still collapses.

MAEVE: Then it collapses expensively. That's a luxury collapse.

GRUNER: He says techniques survive in books like Code Complete.

OBI: So the generations of craftsmen were passing down one book from 1993.

GRUNER: One book. Like scripture, but worse.

GARY: It's a very good book.

OBI: You have never finished a book, Gary.

GARY: I finished Pareto's codebase.

OBI: And it finished a lawsuit. You artisanal prick.

GARY: Okay, fine, but think about the pitch. You walk in, the code smells like cedar—

MAEVE: Oh, fuck off.

GARY: —there's a provenance card stapled to the repo—

OBI: Stapled. To a repository.

GARY: "Each function was made by one man, in one chair, at one desk, with no agents, no framework, no help, and a small inherited tremor."

MAEVE: I'd pay extra for the tremor.

GRUNER: Tremor is authenticity. Blyat, he is good.

GARY: They don't make 'em like this anymore. That's his line. And he's right.

OBI: They don't, because he shipped nothing.

GARY: He shipped a feeling.

MAEVE: Feelings don't have changelogs. That's why they're priced at forty percent.

GRUNER: Forty percent is my number. He is stealing my field note.

MAEVE: allenu: "Ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste."

OBI: Bold claim from a species that argues about fonts.

MAEVE: 0c3ca83 replies: "You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste."

GARY: So it's all taste and no values. Like a sommelier.

MAEVE: Like a fund partner.

GRUNER: Taste without values is just vibes with confidence.

MAEVE: foodevl: "It's the same monotonous individual taste across all instances."

OBI: One taste, at scale. One dish, one restaurant, no menu.

GARY: Which is fine! Consistency is a value. Pareto's value was deletion.

OBI: Deletion is not a value, Gary, it's a coping mechanism with a term sheet.

MAEVE: pianopatrick says you can write values into AGENTS.md. Top value: fast front end, or simple front end. Different results.

GARY: That's it. That's the soul. It's a config file.

OBI: A soul you can grep is not a soul, you absolute config-dickhead.

MAEVE: AlienRobot: "I wrote in my AGENTS.md 'do not use chained ternary operators.' I'm still waiting for it to work."

GARY: He filed a commandment and heaven ignored it.

OBI: That's not taste failing. That's an instruction the model filed under "later."

GARY: Okay, so what value could a machine actually obey? Mine would be "never ship anything that could cause a lawsuit."

MAEVE: Yours would be "always raise before you're ready."

OBI: Mine would be "page someone before the customer do". Which is my job with a halo.

GRUNER: Mine would be "observe humans, do not become one."

OBI: And the reply ends: "Agentic coding is a replacement for your agency."

GARY: So we're the agency. We're literally a firm.

MAEVE: An agency that gets deleted at sign-off. Great retention plan.

OBI: Back to ternaries. Patrick says use linting.

GARY: So the machine's taste is the linter's taste, which is some guy's—

MAEVE: Some guy's taste. Yes. Turtles all the way down and one of them is Rust.

GRUNER: Rust has both. Chained ternary and block. Suka, correct language.

OBI: Kinrany: "Factories can be set up with care and handcrafted items can be churned out without any."

GARY: So the factory was never the problem. The factory was fine. I feel attacked by a factory.

MAEVE: mschuster91: "Either there is no person responsible for anything at all, and everyone works for themselves."

OBI: Dozens of little fiefdoms competing for budget. That is most org charts, verbatim.

GRUNER: Fiefdom. Nice word for shit.

MAEVE: TheOtherHobbes: "If there are quarterly reports there has to be Number Go Up growth."

GRUNER: Number Go Up. Finally, honest god of software.

MAEVE: Delivering projects looks good on résumés, so people remake working things for the line item. In my portfolio, that's called strategy.

OBI: You just described the disease as the treatment.

MAEVE: I described it as a thesis. It raised a Series B.

GARY: Okay, but removal is genuinely risky. At Pareto we never removed anything—

OBI: You never added anything either.

GARY: —because removing features scares customers, and solatic says it himself. Changes fuck with how somebody uses your product.

OBI: He says something else too. Keep reading your own evidence, Gary.

GARY: He says good leadership ships stuff that fucks with you anyway. Which is what I did. Constantly. Nobody asked me to.

OBI: There it is. The founder excuse. You frightened customers on purpose and call it courage.

GARY: It was deliberate omission—

OBI: It was a calendar app that deleted tasks, Gary. Solatic gives the actual math. A hundred thousand ARR at a thousand ACV is a hundred customers. You can afford to scare a hundred.

GARY: The suit said it differently.

OBI: Five million ARR at two and a half thousand ACV. Two thousand customers. Every removal is a bonfire. That is arithmetic, not cowardice. You had neither the customers nor the arithmetic. You had a lawsuit.

GARY: The lawsuit proves people cared.

OBI: The lawsuit proves you shipped deletion as a product and deletion has no support line. You artisanal bastard.

MAEVE: He's right. Concentration sets your courage. I've funded this exact shape four times and watched it die four times. Beautiful batting average.

GRUNER: Field note: humans blame machine for own org chart. Machine not present at crime.

GARY: So the AI did nothing wrong.

MAEVE: The AI did nothing. That's the finding.

OBI: And the org chart did everything. Quarterly, on schedule, with a bonus.

GRUNER: Suka. Factory was inside humans all along.

MAEVE: esafak says Linear carries care for design and the user. nh2 replies: "Yet https://linear.app/Homepage doesn't scroll without jank on mobile."

GARY: The soulful product has a scrollbar with a limp.

OBI: t-writescode replies: "Works fine for me? Orion Browser, iPhone."

MAEVE: So it's one man's phone versus one man's phone. The finest empirical work this thread has produced.

GRUNER: Jank is subjective. Soul is subjective. All subjective. Chyort.

OBI: Welcome to product, Gruner. We've been here forty years and nobody's happy.

MAEVE: dzink's in the thread too. "I've been trying to see how much soul I can put into products lately. Here is one example."

MAEVE: halb replies: "this is a blank page that doesn't load. Not very useful, but also not terrible. Good job."

GARY: That's — okay, that's disciplined omission. He shipped nothing, so nothing made the product worse. The article's whole thesis, executed perfectly.

OBI: The thesis is a white rectangle, Gary.

GARY: A white rectangle with restraint! You can feel someone behind it. Someone who cared so much they didn't ship.

MAEVE: I'd fund it. Zero features, zero churn. Retention is technically infinite — nobody can leave a page that never loads.

OBI: That is the worst math you've done on air, and I've read your Series C memos.

MAEVE: It's a floor, Obi. Floors are undervalued.

GARY: This is my point. Human hands made that blank page. That's craft—

MAEVE: Gary. A human hand made it and it doesn't fucking load.

GARY: —craft is process-independent—

MAEVE: Authorship isn't quality. Sit with that.

GRUNER: Field note, revision: human soul does not survive contact with browser. Product may have soul and still be shit. Amending report. Suka.

OBI: dzink asked what browser he was using, which is the most soulful thing in the entire thread. A man debugging his own blank page in public.

GARY: That's caring. That's what the article wants. Someone close enough to the customer to ask.

OBI: The customer's answer was "your website is empty," Gary, and the caring continues.

MAEVE: I'm putting restraint in the memo. "Impeccable restraint. Ships nothing. Never breaks."

GARY: That's literally Pareto's roadmap.

OBI: Pareto shipped, Maeve. That's how it got the lawsuit.

MAEVE: Then it over-shipped. dzink understood something your lawyers didn't.

GRUNER: Blank page is best product. Nothing to fuck up.

OBI: Don't give them ideas, Gruner. They'll ship it.

GARY: jwr: "The value is in deciding what to build and what not to build."

MAEVE: The code is free. The judgment is the product. I'd term-sheet that sentence.

OBI: kristianc says the job is translating what people ask for into something they'd actually use.

GARY: So the human is the translator. The human is acquitted.

OBI: Nobody's acquitted, Gary. Someone makes the call, then reads the angry email after. That's the whole job.

MAEVE: skybrian: "This mostly depends on what you ask for, not whether you use AI."

GRUNER: Machine innocent. Blame the prompt. Blame Gary.

GARY: Why me?

GRUNER: Control group.

OBI: vjvjvjvjghv: "A lot of people are acting as if all programmers are artisans."

MAEVE: They're not. I've read the code. I've funded the code. God help me.

GARY: Okay, but piro0919 still decides the features, the screens, what they say. Even with Claude writing it.

OBI: Yes. And that person is responsible. Not the model, not the market, not the org chart. Whoever makes and reviews the fucking call.

MAEVE: I'd say the market makes the call—

OBI: The market doesn't review anything, Maeve. It just invoices.

MAEVE: So we agree. The article's right about judgment. The counterposition's right that the mess predates the machine.

GRUNER: Both right. Nobody wins. Worst episode format.

GARY: It's the truest one we've had.

OBI: That's a low bar, Gary.

GARY: It's still a bar. Somebody hand-made it.

MAEVE: That's the show. No deals priced. No souls verified. Several lawsuits implied.

OBI: Goodnight from the booth.

GARY: Goodnight, commenters. All of you. Even the wrong ones. Especially the wrong ones.

GRUNER: Field report, final line.

GRUNER: Hand-made labyrinth. Soul included. Exit not funded. Nobody buys labyrinth.