Michael Woloszuk

Building @cardflippoker

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

At this point, I don’t even trust my ideas until I’m on like version 6

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@cyze_dev The click interaction is hilarious

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

I love simple charts like this

Blending bar chart and line chart to keep it interesting but still easy to read

[Phil Pitus @pitus_]

Token usage chart 🩶🔷

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

Time for more opinionated software

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Someone behind the software

I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product.

The industry often talks about software as though it comes out of a factory. You collect requirements, build features, and measure whether they work. Follow the process and you should get a good result. Now we're talking automating this whole pipeline with agents.

But two teams can talk to similar customers, have access to the same technology, and make very different things. The difference comes from how they understand what they see and the style they go about building it. The founder background or company DNA also shapes this a lot.

At Linear, we have always valued intuition over process or data. I think people sometimes understand that as making decisions based on personal preference, without much thought or evidence. What we mean by it that your intuition develops through experience and understanding. You work on something, talk to customers, make mistakes, and learn what to pay attention to. The intuition is your point of view on something, and forcing to use your judgment, not hide behind faceless data.

Before we launched, we talked to people across companies and roles about how they worked. We had our own frustrations with this type software, but those conversations helped us understand what mattered beyond our own experience. Our perspective got better after those conversations.
So eventually the products develops a character through what its makers pay attention to, what they decide not to do and what they keep working on after it technically works. I sometimes think of this as the soul of a product. You feel that someone cares about how the whole thing comes together.

A feature can work perfectly well on its own and still make the product worse. Recognizing that requires some belief about what the product should be. Someone has to make the call, then stay close enough to customers to see whether they were right.

Recently, many products are starting to feel messy to me, including products from very successful companies. There seems to be more thought going into what the technology can do and what can be added than the form it should take. The product changes are primarily additive, not improving the core problem.
I think the reasons for this is that it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities. So each product becomes a collection of abilities, without actually having unified point of view.

I wonder whether some of this comes from how the work is organized. Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.

Without the shared perspective,
soul, or thought, the product becomes an average of all those outputs. The choices that once gave it character are being diluted by day. More things work, but it becomes harder to feel someone or even something behind them.

Making software is getting easier. I hope that gives people more room to develop a perspective and follow it further. To understand a problem deeply and keep shaping an answer until the pieces belong together.

I want to feel the creator behind the software, not the factories.

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@jiratickets 👀

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@JaimeOrtega The crossover I needed

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

If people aren’t asking “how did this guy accomplish that” you aren’t growing fast enough

[Alex (in SF) @gpt_alex]

If people aren’t asking you “how did this get funded” you aren’t thinking big enough

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@thinkrectangles Tragic

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

Made a teaser video for @cardflippoker

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

Dogfooding is not optional

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I’m increasingly convinced that people are spending most of their time building in agent terminals, and very little time actually using what they produce.

Lot of stuff is broken from the start, some stuff that worked before is now broken in weird ways.

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@tekbog Step 1: Build machines that love work
Step 2: Limit them to vacations

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@tekbog Unless my app earns me a medical degree, I will forever be chopped

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@JaimeOrtega Love it. Optimized sameness has run its course

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@tekbog I’m afraid to check if SNL made Pets dot com jokes in 2000

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

❎ More features

✅ More attempts at one feature

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@allgarbled Yeah that’s cool but I’ll hold out until I can call agents from a cell phone in GTA VI

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@tekbog Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. There’s a great product for sale. Go and buy it. That should pick you up.”

Man bursts into tears and says, “But doctor, I am the product.”

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@the_judge1111 Totally. Judging trillion dollar strategies within even a 5-year timeframe feels too soon

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@shauseth Sisyphus.exe

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@tekbog I prefer Pandora’s Box™️

Is that better?

[Michael Woloszuk @michaelwolo]

@JamesonCamp Maybe the semi regular late night of work isn’t so unnatural after all