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What I was saying in that piece though was, I think we were right to be skeptical that time. But now, I see the same thing playing out with would you be willing to ship it some code you didn't read? There's no point in arguing about if it will happen or when it will happen. Talk about what it would take.
You know features are the fun part. A new feature is is just a prompt away. The real cost comes after every feature we shipped of course with a configuration option because we didn't want to break everyone's setup.
in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.
Given the high cost of errors, you need to have a very high level of safety and a very high level of confidence on day one before you deploy your first robot, before you drive your your first autonomous mile.
you know, the world is like really just, you know, barely even ready for this technology today. And I think, you know, as a builder, we have a responsibility to prepare the world, right?
This is a supersonic engine adapted for ground power generation that can ship without the rest of the airplane, thereby generating the test data, the learnings, the reliability, and also the capital that we need to go big.
And so it's like I mean getting into Eli Goldrat and the goal is like optimizing for utilization and efficiency of one node in your factory rather than the end to end goal of like how do we ship value and things that people like that are stable and like will last a long time. But that's my idea of token harder
You'll notice what I said was not use loops to ship the features that users want. We use loops to actually improve the codebase quality and we read all the code because we care about how it's architected and we care not just about the system architecture but what I would call the program design
We tried this. We built a lights off software factory in July of 2025 and by November we had shut it down. I think it takes about three to six months of you shipping all the time with nobody reading the code before you realize like, wow, this is getting way worse and it's easier to start over than it is to fix it.
Then you had code review which gave you another level of feedback. You could roll out internally more frequently. And everybody was using Facebook for all kinds of stuff, personal and internal business stuff. So whatever feature you developed, people would start using it immediately. So you get another round of feedback. Then we had this phased roll out process where you'd start rolling your stuff out. If there was a problem, the blast radius would be limited to a a few million people.
if if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen you, you're not going to get that from consumers, ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback.
You can build "the hard thing" in a good market, with every advantage, and still lose if what you ship doesn't give people enough reason to leave what they're already using.
The job of product isn't to just receive a problem and ship the immediate solution. It's to absorb all the problems and understand that there's one solution you can ship to fix 50 different problems.
We're now doing it in a much heavier way because we find that these like kind of bory enterprisey uh patterns end up being pretty useful because you have a bunch of idiots on your team now. The coding agents are a bunch of idiots and they are going to work 24/7 and they're going to like ship a lot of stuff. So you need way more guardrails than you used to.
The thing that I find interesting is that's not novel. This has been the thing we've always been trying to do forever. How do we get a junior engineer to ship code safely without breaking stuff? Right? How do we make patterns in the codebase? How do we make tests? Like it's it's all the old stuff that we've always wanted to do.
The moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.
I think the same kind of principle applies with agents in that they can talk to the compiler. It will tell them what to fix. So I guess this could be a case. We we'll see. But Rust could be a pretty promising candidate for to use for agents because they can get more feedback and it's just hard it's harder to to ship certain type of bugs or maybe impossible to have certain type of bugs.
for us design actually has always operated as like a bottleneck at the company, which is incredibly important, right? It's intentional that things need to be approved by design to ship.
For years, it was faster to mock up software than to ship it. Designers stayed "ahead" of engineering with prototypes. Now AI coding agents make development so much faster that the loop has flipped.
But in Vietnam and also in a lot of other Asian countries, people are on the move all the time. Like people are on the motorbike all the time. So, they actually really don't like typing. So, the voice like a lot of the companies in Vietnam actually deploy voice bots before they do uh do chatbot.
It used to be that you have documentation for other people who are going to use your library, but like you shouldn't do that anymore. Like you should have instead of HTML documents for humans, you have markdown documents for agents.
The lesson is you just got to get something that you can that you can have that people can see the vision of where you're going. Um, but don't don't do what we did. Get to market faster. I wish we had.
And that's why when you have a missionritical product like email where you are interfacing with customers with candidates with investors it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a halfbaked product.
Mind candy, historical creature-feature thriller: in which the US military, in the form of the very worst ship in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, comes up against beasts which are not oversized plesiosaurs. (Exactly what they are instead would be a minor spoiler.) I have no idea how I found this online, but it's perfectly enjoyable as a specimen of the genre.
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
Mind candy: Military SF by someone who must've spent a big chunk of time in the (US?) military. The novel is good on the inter-personal dynamics of the service and especially of the small ship.
The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves.
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