• Rather, the most valuable engineering work is going to be having good ideas. The important ideas are still coming from outside the software factory. In fact, the purpose of this whole machine is to minimize the amount of things we have to think about that aren’t high-upside. source⌝#

  • Killer features are still company-making. Cursor Tab, Descript’s transcript editing, OpenRouter abstracting inference vendors behind a common billing interface … good ideas require problem intimacy and domain expertise, and engineers will need to contribute to that process.
  • Killer architecture is still high-leverage. The right simplification still saves an enormous amount of complexity later on, which manifests in fewer bugs and easier product iteration. A little bit of forethought makes high-value features low-hanging later on. There’s still a lot of value in working out a more correct data model or adding a queue in the right place or building the scaffolding for a better way to test the product.