Someone behind the software
- ID
- 36849
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 19 Oct 2026, 12:32 AM
- Fetched
- 19 Oct 2026, 6:03 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://karrisaarinen.com/posts/someone-behind-the-software/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 19 Oct 2026, 6:03 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
In an October 15, 2026 post, Karri Saarinen argues that products carry the perspective of their makers — shaped by what they pay attention to, what they decline to build, and what they keep refining after it 'technically works' — and that Linear deliberately values intuition over process or data, where intuition means judgment built from customer conversations and mistakes, not personal preference. His concrete complaint is about current products, including ones from very successful companies, feeling 'messy': changes are primarily additive rather than rethinking existing capabilities, so products become a collection of abilities with no unified point of view. He ties that to how work is organised now — individuals working with agents to produce changes independently, 'each operating a small software factory' — where each change makes sense alone but together resembles Frankenstein's monster.
Why it matters
If your team has several people each running their own agent to ship independent changes, this is a direct argument that the output will drift into additive bloat unless someone owns coherence across those changes. The concrete decision: name who holds the point of view on the core problem before you scale up parallel agent-driven PRs, and treat 'a feature can work perfectly well on its own and still make the product worse' as a review criterion, not just a nice line.
Discussion angle
Ask the room: has anyone seen feature bloat appear from parallel agent-driven changes, and what review gate or ownership rule did you add to stop it? Karri's claim is that the fix is a person holding a point of view, not a better process — do you agree?