Three constraints before I build anything

I've been calling these things product primitives. I can't remember where I heard that term, but it refers to things like...

Blocks in Notion. Messages and conversations in Telegram. Frames and layers in Figma. Tweets in Twitter. Cells and sheets in Excel. Tools and layers in Photoshop. Commands in a CLI.

I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives. A bad product doesn't know what its primitives are. Or it has a very large number of primitives. It feels like everything in the product is some unique thing that works in its own unique way. So users have to learn a ton of different top-level primitives/concepts. It's confusing and intimidating and hard to teach. Ideally you just want one or two or three main primitives.

The complexity/power in an app comes from choosing powerful primitives that have depth, that are composable, etc. You can do a lot with Notion blocks. You can do a lot with Excel cells. You can do a lot with a CLI command. You can do a lot with a Minecraft block. There's depth there.

We started with the second two points: our core technology was a sampler that enables arbitrary hierarchical Bayesian graph models for sparse data, our constraint was cpu bound tractable compute. The piece that took us the longest to discover was the fact that our end products need to be separate from our underlying technology.

We were given that advice in various words from many people even before we started but some lessons need to be lived to be learned.

I have no hard data to back it up, but in my experience, projects that take the time to put everyone on the same page conceptually (even if it's a 1 pager, high level, here's what we are and are not doing) end up succeeding far more often than projects that wing it. The wing it projects always end up disappointing everyone who had opinions but never bothered to articulate them.

I’m gonna go do these…

The most elegant solutions typically arise not out of unbounded degrees of freedom, but building specifically with a constraint in mind.

I think that this goes with point 1: composing the one pager helps define those constraints.

The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.

I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.