Software Is Losing Its Soul to the Agent Factory
Someone Behind the Software
Karri Saarinen, co-founder of Linear, argues that good products carry the perspective of their makers—their experience, taste, and judgment. When teams build features independently with agents, each change may make sense alone but together becomes a Frankenstein's monster, an average of outputs with no unified point of view. More things work, yet it's harder to feel someone behind them.
Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
- jwr
As a SaaS author, I couldn't agree more. That's how I see my work: the value is not in the code (AI can code better than me at this point), nor even in the software architecture (AI is just getting to the point where it will get better than me). It's in deciding what to build and what not to build, defining the overall character and vision of the product, looking at each screen and thinking "how does this help my customer do their job".
This, unfortunately, takes time, as one has to restart many times because of ideas that turned out not to be as great as one had initially thought. And it results in software that is called "opinionated", and often does not follow what the "industry" does.
- allenu
Something I've been thinking about a lot is that ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste. Even with humans, each of us has different values, intent, and taste, although we do share many of these things. As a living human being, you have biological or cultural desires and particular goals that you want to accomplish while you're alive on this earth.
When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.
When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.
- ajrouvoet
I enjoyed the introduction. I just picked up “The mind of the Maker” by Sayers, which Fred Brooks cites in The Mythical Man Month: “ Dorothy Sayers, in her excellent book, The Mind of the Maker, divides creative activity into three stages: the idea, the implementation, and the interaction. A book, then, or a computer, or a program comes into existence first as an ideal construct, built outside time and space, but complete in the mind of the author.” He goes on to say how the user meets the mind of the maker in the interaction: “The creation is complete
when someone reads the book, uses the computer, or runs the
program, thereby interacting with the mind of the maker.”
- jakub_g
> it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities. So each product becomes a collection of abilities, without actually having unified point of view.
This is a a very good and succinct summarization.
What I'm also observing recently also is that pretty much every product tries to expand to do things that completely different products used to do, and become a mega-product-for-everything. It's like a Zawinski's Law on steroids.
- simonbarker87
“Great software is opinionated” is something life been saying for years. I forget if I read it somewhere, heard it or came to the concept in my own thinking. All that is to say I don’t claim it’s a unique thought. And yet. I have to say it so often to the teams I’ve worked with or managed.
The opinions are those of the creators and that isn’t changing with AI.
- kristianc
This age will be brilliant for sorting between those who care about "done" as in "technically complete" vs "done" as "creates enduring value for the person on the other end of it". AI largely only does the former.
- dmitrijbelikov
> There seems to be more thought going into what the technology can do and what can be added than the form it should take.
Yes, it looks like people've choosen chat interface. They don't like filling forms.
> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
Before agents people do the same and our code bases not perfect.
Behind software not only creator, it's people who interested in and users. To make software creator needs a factory.
> Making software is getting easier.
Nope, cuz we have a lot of Frankensteins and chat interface
- mik3y
I strongly agree with this take. And in particular, I've been wondering about this:
> Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently,
> each operating a small software factory.
>
> [...] together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster
> rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.
Do solo developers consequently have a bit of an advantage today when it comes to producing tasteful, opinionated software?