[patcon]

Doesn't this just mean we need to get better at the active deconstruction and disassembly process? Like it's too easy to build, so we build more things we realize later that we shouldn't. Now, a comparable energy budget we used to use "deciding what to build" (because labour was scarce) is now energy we can divert toward "unbuilding stuff that was a mistake".

I'd much rather learn to live in the latter world. That world is based more on validated experience, and less on assumptions about a hypothetical future that hasn't yet been experienced.

Of course, we will perhaps start to atrophe in our skills at projecting futures, which is a real concern. As in "what's the benefit of building robust mental models of the future when it makes more sense to YOLO through it and experience it the results directly?"

It's all a little scary, to be honest. It turns a lot of the world on its head in many ways. Experientially tumbling into things with robust sensing processes... this is perhaps becoming more important than modelling futures in a judicious sense of economizing resources...

[Swizec]

> Now, a comparable energy budget we used to use "deciding what to build" (because labour was scarce) is now energy we can divert toward "unbuilding stuff that was a mistake"

The hard part is that you very quickly become Salesforce or Jira or <insert large confusing product>.

You have thousands of users who love your product and pay lots of money and find the features absolutely essential to their workflow. Everyone says your product is bloated and has too many useless features, if only you could delete a bunch of crap they don’t use your software would be perfect.

They all use a different 20%. Delete a feature, lose a fifth of your users.

[patcon]

Great point. It's probably obvious from my take that I build a lot of bespoke software, and have blind spots about the pitfalls of building at scale :)