Product

Product taste, accreted from what holds up in practice. Each principle below is load-bearing on its own; apply the ones the current decision touches.

Boil the ocean

Scope the ambition to what agents made possible, not to what a team could hand-write before them. The cost of building collapsed, so the layer beneath you is fair game to rebuild — the framework, the bundler, the auth vendor — and the plan that sounds insane is worth costing out before it is dismissed. The ambition that was reckless when a person wrote every line is now merely expensive, and expensive is a number you can check.

The primitive is the product

The durable unit of value is the smallest capability others build on. Everything above it is packaging.