Essays on cinema, craft, human-first technology, and building software for humans, by Bruno Hart. Published when each one is finished.
A musical score is a document whose entire job is to be read by someone other than its author. Software pretended otherwise for forty years. Now that code generation has removed the typing bottleneck, the last remaining scarcity is the human capacity to understand what was written — and legibility becomes the asset.
The cost of producing software, images, copy, prototypes — approaching zero. Abundance always destroys the value of the abundant good and relocates it to whatever just became scarce. The newly scarce thing is craft: the irreducible judgment about which tool, which sequence, which finish, which standard.
The largest companies are fighting over whose worldview the next decade of work gets thought through. The real axis is not vertical versus horizontal — it is human-first versus agentic-first. Value will accrue to whoever architects how the loop serves humanity, not how humanity serves the loop.
A schedule posted in advance pulls strangers into the same hour, the same room, looking the same way for two hours. Cinema is one of the last protocols of public assembly humans still physically inhabit at scale. The architecture remains; the function has thinned — and that gap is the opening.