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Paul Ford, on the Aboard podcast, describing a spiral I recognise more than I’d like to:

Let me describe what happened. So I’ve built a couple relatively good small products around things like CRM, some enhanced tech search, signed kind of stuff, and so on. And I’ve turned to you and I’ve said, we need to get to a place where I can bring you in as product manager to get this out of my hands. But I keep screwing around in the meantime because I’m trying to learn. So here’s what happens. I realize something is missing. And then I’m like, I tell, I prompted into being a new feature, a new add-on, a new way to look, a visualization. And then that visualization, which is not the main core of what I’m trying to do—it’s a distraction. It’s just not quite where I need it to be. I don’t need it at all. No one needs it. I’m the only person using the software right now. But now you know what has become the only and most important thing in my entire life?

“What?”

Finishing that visualization. And then while I’m working on that visualization, I realized that I could abstract it into a library so I could reuse it. And then, you know, what becomes the most important thing in my life? Abstracting the library. Building a library. And then each component of the library. And so because this enables it, the minute somebody starts saying you can parallelize this with lots of agents, you know you’re in a pickle. Because that means more software, whereas absolutely no one outside of our world is actually sitting there saying, I need more software.