Sufficiently advanced product thinking is indistinguishable from protocol thinking.

You don’t even need to assume power users, just adventurous ones who aren’t shy about telling coding agents what they want done. The reference client is merely like a YouTube demo of cooking a recipe, not necessarily the thing you use. This hadn't sunk in for me before. “Products” are now only worth doing if the compute required to build it is really high, or there are genuinely novel solution techniques that don't follow from the spec. The protocol is some combo of the approximate recipe and the test suite you have to pass.

Venkatesh Rao (@contraptions): Interesting learning from working on blygger… ↗