Building at the Speed of Thinking
I’m embarrassed to say but over the last few months I’ve gotten in the habit of checking my GitHub contribution graph. And I can glibly say I’ve just had my biggest week yet.
Lots of recent talk about LOC (lines of code) as the (bad) measure of productivity. $500k engineers with $250k token budgets.
I keep circling around a few concepts — if there were two artists, one creates 100 paintings, and another 1, you wouldn’t naturally assume the former was better.
We’re reaching a point where you can almost build at the speed of thinking. But you certainly can’t validate at the speed of thinking.
I recently bumped up to the 20x Claude Max plan, and still almost hit my budget for the first week. I’m getting used to handing off bigger and bigger tasks — it really shouldn’t surprise anyone with product experience, but if you add horsepower, expectations increase, often at a greater rate than the horsepower added.
Are you a looper, or are you a crafter? Can you be both?
Like “number of paintings produced”, we know LOC isn’t a perfect measurement — but it is something, and its easy to quantify.
Moving up the “useful metric” ladder, we usually talk about the amount of value delivered as a better unit of measurement for software. Assuming our PM process with all its checks and balances is spot on, when that feature checklist wraps up, it’s done done docs and all, validated value is in the market.
But then there is also adoption. Is that thing being used?
I view how these things are changing like this — and note I’m thinking mostly non gigantic B2B here:
Output is exponentially increasing, duh.
Speed of validation is pretty much flat, depending how you look at it. If you’ve got eyeballs and are able to run a/b or similar autonomously, good for you — but on net new products I’d view this as harder to know if you’ll actually get paying customers.
And finally, our ability to get adoption, I’d argue is actually going down. There is so much more product out there, and the share of adoption you should expect to get is going down.
Not only that, there is definitely product, tech, AI fatigue and distrust thats dragging it down further. In some circles at least.
The more abundant supply is, the more scarce demand is. Distribution becomes the moat, yada yada.
There is another angle to building at this scale which I find interesting; in a more traditional org you’d be lucky to spend 20% of your time on tech debt or side quests. Now you can fling them out and have agents loop on them to your hearts content.
If you follow the fat skills model, and minus your CRUD and the hardened business value (which is only the repeated optimizations on prompts), so much of the time you’re making optimization decisions, forcing a bake in of a lesson learning through an agentic exchange. And as we get better those basic lessons get baked in automatically, and we keep raising the bar.
You as the product leader need to be the one standing at the gate making quality and taste decisions, and knowing if all those PRs are net good, or net bad. It’s a lot! In my case, a few PRs have gotten through that have affected customers (in minor yet surprising ways) and it’s easy to become a tad gun shy about the absolute frenzy your agents are having in your codebase.
The size of task I can bite off is growing over time. But it still takes a long time to push out a boulder sized feature — and while that is ongoing, dozens of other things big and small are getting picked up, started, stalled, shipped. Even though horsepower has exploded, so has multitasking due to the latency on the responses and validation.
The same thing occurs with new staff of course, its just a bit more surprising when it’s software. My feeling is creatives will yearn for tools that reduce the latency to let them continue to be in the loop and course correct frequently, essentially applying their craft and taste as often as possible, and factory workers and infantry will be perfectly content pushing their LOC to the moon.
I’m excited to get back to a point where I can essentially think it, and see the result. Get back to single tasking. Be actively creating the thing. And sure, I could paint the painting now but… we have some pretty big brushes we gotta test out first.
Pete Steinberger uses a VISION.md. Checking his commit graph he’s had days with ~3k contributions in a single day.
Differnet projects. Different customers. Know what you’re doing, who it’s for, what’s important to them. Serve them as best you can. Different strokes.
The recent piece on self replicating software is fascinating.
To me its a bit of a race to the bottom in terms of an optimization function that mindlessly rewards satisfying a need, delivering just in time solutions to problems barely articulated, vs purpose built software that has been vetted and thoughtfully designed by a human.
It reminds a little of the SEO game over the last 20 years. I have in the past piously scoffed at hearing of businesses spun up opportunistically on keyword gaps, google trends, or people mentioning problems on reddit. Building up website slop (before we called it that) just to get traffic to mine clicks. Essentially the web and it’s ad economy (which in a lot of ways is it’s business model).
It’s not all that different from the Greg Isenberg kind of problem mining — amazing schemes to find opportunities but… for a business to be durable and trustworthy, it takes heart, passion, and vision. The inception story matters a lot too, at least to me.
In the age of software factories, the craftsmen become the nudgers, they become the filters on the content being created.
We still seek out humans with taste. Humans want human judgement, to suggest and advocate for things that might be of some benefit. Or now, we all can build for ourselves.
The craft is in some way becoming the validation and curation of an endless sea of code.
Is this agent fatigue? Or is this… just what you do when you run out of your weekly token budget, knowing it will reset by Monday night! Apologies for the lack of references, but I mostly wrote this whole damn thing (I did bounce around the ideas with Claude yesterday, but now I’ve REALLY borked my budget, and don’t want to miss the momentum and let it rot). Most references can be found by searching X and Threads, like em or love em it is where the latest stuff bubbles up.
Apologies for the lack of editing, I’m sure there are some wrinkles. I do miss writing. But building software right now has never been more fun, and for this I am grateful, and curious. And thanks for reading!! Onwards!!