Most of us want to do great work. Building things of exceptional quality – work that’s beautiful, lovable, fast – is one of life’s great joys. However, the story goes, capitalism doesn’t value quality. Businesses don’t fund software that is lovable. Thus, you need to make a career choice: do you want to be a craftsperson, or do you want to make money? This dichotomy is nonsense. I mean, yes, these…
This week’s discussion of the ChatGPT app and its move to Electron merits a link to my evergreen article The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform : At the highest level, cross-platform UI technologies prioritize coordinated featurefulness over polished simplicity. I’ve added a coda to that article about how coding agents actually strengthen the argument for Electron on large teams, at least for…
Word on the street is that the cost of building software is going to zero. Zero? Sounds like a good deal! Over the last year, my co-founder and I have iteratively automated our coding loops. Each time better tools revealed a bottleneck, we’d address it. Agents would sometimes break things or propose slop, so we added more tests and guardrails . Our PRs piled up, so we automated the mechanical…