Dax Raad

You have a system that's doing a bunch of stuff.

You need to add a feature to it.

The system doesn't exactly support the feature.

So your options are rethink the system from first principles, redesign it so it supports that feature or just absorb the hack temporarily.

And you can make a judgment call on which one you do, depending on how bad the hack is, depending on how valuable to the company it is to get this feature out.

You make the judgment call.

That judgment, that ability to have that judgment is so distorted right now because the agent will just do the hacky thing for you.

The agent will kind of deal with the hacky problems that come down the road.

And it's way easier to be like, oh, yeah, it's a temporary fix.

So we're shipping way more hacks in places where we should have just rethought the whole system from ground up or like redesign it and refactor it to make it more flexible.

Yeah, exactly.

I think the way you put it is exactly right.

That prickle, that feeling that you get, it's like muted now because someone else, it's kind of like you've made someone else deal with the problem.

The problem is still there and the landmines are still going to blow up on you eventually, but you don't feel that bad feeling as much anymore.

So your judgment is skewed.

You're not getting that feedback loop.

yeah exactly like you need to i mean just like you need to be using your own product you need to be also like you need to feel the pain that the users are feeling same thing with your code base same thing everywhere so yeah i think all of life is about having the proper feedback loops in place and it's very easy for those to go away another third thing that you said in this memo was related to this one is we need to spend more time cleaning things up

Yeah, it's really hard because every single day we wake up, there is a thousand people yelling at us telling us to do X, Y, Z things.

There's a thousand people telling us we're doing everything wrong.

Every single day, there is like a competitive new product that shows up.