Build the Goddamn Product

The number of times I still see “Loop Engineering” popping up in any of my feeds is truly upsetting.

The amount of effort you spend on meta-engineering is an illusion of a return on investment that will allow you to build the product better, faster and with greater ease.

It’s the same as building your own framework, or framework-in-a-framework, because you think that all other frameworks out there are slowing down your ability to build the actual product.

While you’re building your bespoke framework, you’re not building the product. You’re not using it, you’re not feeling whether the idea you had in your mind is actually working that well. You’re not shipping anything, and you don’t get user feedback.

“Question your requirements, delete unnecessary parts of the process, optimize them, automate last.” That’s roughly an Elon Musk quote. I want to emphasize that I despise Elon Musk and I wish it wasn’t his quote. It’s very fitting to software engineering cycles as well. I cannot fathom how we evolved backwards into believing that we should focus on the automation first.

You’re building your own illusion of future productivity. But just like building your own framework, it won’t work quite like you imagined it would work (who would’ve thought!), and you continue to tinker with your custom framework instead of building the actual product. You’re adding unnecessary requirements with unnecessary parts and telling yourself it will pay off. You will hit the same inevitable experiences: the features you add to the product don’t feel right, you need to iterate, but iterating takes the same amount of time as before, with the addition that now you’re hitting snags in your own bespoke framework (or automation), so you spend time tinkering with it instead of iterating on the actual feature. It’s a downward spiral and you will feel worse.

It will only take a few months and the next “groundbreaking” way to work with AI is shoved down your throat. Anxiety will hit you, you’ll abandon your loops, and jump onto the next hot thing.

If tinkering with these things is fun, then tinker with them. But keep in mind that you’re playing around. You’re adding something that you don’t really need, and you’re not building the goddamn product.