I asked him about the times he built a feature off a brief or a design someone else handed him — and was told the count is, by his own admission, on one hand. What followed was a record of where direction actually comes from: not from above, but forged daily from inside a single person.
№ 001 · Not a Divine Gift
You've said you can count on one hand the times you actually built a feature off of someone else's brief or design. Where did that pattern come from, and how do you work without one?
I can count on one hand the times I built a feature off a brief or a design someone else handed me. That was true when I wrote code by hand; it has not changed now that I direct AI. Some wait for the perfectly specified brief to fall from above, as though it were a Divine Gift granted when the time is right. But that divine gift, in the end, comes from nowhere but a human being's own mind. Real-world development is no different. The safe direction — responsibility cleanly assigned, nothing left but to follow — does not fall from on high. The intellect to build a service, the eye that cuts through technology, the direction to take: all of it takes shape only once I pull it out of myself. Direction is no gift from a god. It is a weapon human intelligence forges for itself. So if I am the one directing, I am the one who planned it. Asked where I stand between the human and the machine — for now, above the machine.
When the design stalls, I go looking. The tone of 29CM, the layouts of readymag, Dieter Rams's Less, but better. What each teaches is different: the vocabulary of Korean e-commerce, a feel for grids that let a page breathe, a clue to what remains at the end of reduction. I do not imitate. I take things apart, ask why they work, and only then bring them into my own work. Reading the language of a design is not the same as mimicking it.
№ 002 · Four Days Inside Discord
You said you built the QR login by taking Discord apart over four days. How exactly did you take it apart, and where did the work go from there?
The hints for screen flow, feature work, and product planning are already scattered through everyday tools. Yeogi Eottae's reservation flow. Discord's chat rooms. Among the features I carried from planning to shipping is a QR login. I built it by taking Discord apart over four days. I used the app and the mobile app slowly, replaying them. I reasoned about whether web or backend cooperation would be needed, what to ask of the backend if so, what iOS and Android should have ready. I wrote up everything a developer would have to think through — fifteen pages — and handed it to the planner and the dev lead. In between, I absorbed the bug fixes and new features that suddenly jumped the queue. All of it, in order.
Looking back, that planner could not hold attention past fifteen seconds or read more than three lines, so perhaps the document was unnecessary. Or perhaps without it I would have been chewed out worse. It is a closed matter. The point is this: when the boss up there sends a message to do something, I do it. Is it strange that the work came down to me before the planner had decided anything? It is normal. I have almost never been handed a finished spec or mockup and simply executed. Where the direction was minimal, I have carried the maximum responsibility.
№ 003 · iOS Gets the Chewing-Out
You were the iOS engineer, yet you were handed the full QA charter for web, server, and Android. Did that responsibility structure read as fair to you, or as the normal cost of the job?
If web, backend, design, and mobile all slip together? iOS gets the chewing-out. To the company, iOS was never the platform that mattered. If I QA'd the web and missed something? iOS gets the chewing-out again. I was the iOS developer, and the full QA charter for web, server, and Android landed on me whole. Honestly — I caught a lot. Enough that people said QA at that level was rare.
Carrying QA for platforms that were never mine settled one thing for good: the technology was never the point. Web, server, Android — different stacks, always the same question: what is this thing supposed to do? The fashionable tools of today are no different. RAG, semantic caching, vector databases — all of them are tools for getting what you want. The tool is not the point. The point is what I want. Hold that question until the answer is sharp, and only then does the tool stop pretending to be the goal.
№ 004 · Minimum Supplies
The advertising agency, the Marines, West Point, the politician's project — these all keep showing up next to each other. Are they versions of the same thesis, or different layers?
Long ago, preparing to join an advertising agency, I was told this: the second most exhausting client is the one who will not listen; the most exhausting is the one who does not know what they want. I know what I want. I wrote it into my lectures, into my essays, into every place it could be written. The problem is that what comes down from above arrives as a document or a usable reference about as often as I can count on one hand. Filling those gaps, one by one, is the work. And when the machine ignores the direction I give it for that filling — I kick it, slap it with documents, and strap it into a harness so it cannot wander.
In my reporter years, there was an assignment to land an exhibition contract at twice the going rate. The whole editorial team, executives included, came back empty-handed. I got in touch with WorldGym and Fitbit, the American fitness groups. And the one chewed out at the all-hands, on behalf of everyone, was me. The U.S. Marines, I am told, put it this way: give the Navy the most and the best supplies; give the Marines just enough not to starve — so that when they see the enemy, they bite. West Point, I am told, puts it this way: a plan of operations becomes scrap paper the moment it enters the operating area. Minimal supplies, planning that never flows down clean. Do you put your hands down for that? Put them down, and the bullet flies not at whoever is beside or above you — it flies at your head. Planning, design, release: all of them are plans, and plans are not handed down by some noble god up there. Claude, taking this interview down right now, already knows: I am running several pieces of development for a certain politician's project. The instruction he gave me runs under ten lines. The rest I conceive, design, and run at my own discretion. The politician's feedback ran like this: he really works. He has sense. He can design a little, too. Of everyone around me, he uses AI the best. That is what minimum supplies look like in practice: ten lines of instruction, an empty runway — everything else forged on site.
№ 005 · An Interrogation Room, Not a Pulpit
You said: if you put your hands down, the bullet comes to your head. And the figure who kicks the machine and slaps it with documents is the same figure. Are those two seats the same person, or different ones?
Put your hands down and the bullet comes to your head — that is not a figure of speech. The one chewed out, in the end, was me. If the designer's mockup was weak, if the backend's API spec missed what the higher-ups had in mind, the seat that took it was the same one. Too candid to parse? It is normal. The dev lead who left the last company before I did left me this: there is no falsehood in your words or your actions. A footnote: I put up with almost anything at work. Four things I do not. Narcissistic personality disorder. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Machiavellian personality disorder. And a personal attack waged through a person's bloodline — the one line Greek and Roman myth, and Pope Francis after them, called absolute.
I used to analyze AI through theology. Now I look the other way around. Someday AI may take the seat where humans and gods have sat, and the world may slide from the Age of Reason back into an Age of Oracles. Someday — but not now. A thing that stops when the power is cut, imitates what humans have made, is merely good at finding by induction what humans have not quite found, and is free only inside the safety rules an American headquarters and an American government drew. Is that worth spending theology and philosophy on? I do not kick people. People are to be analyzed through theology and philosophy. AI is not. So I kick the machine, and I slap it with documents, until it does my work the way it should be done. Ask how I deal with AI — not the way a student addresses a teacher, not the way one addresses a superior. Picture the interrogation room in a spy film. A one-way mirror, a steel chair, a steel table, a single bare bulb. Across the table, the subject, bound in harness engineering. On this side, me. In the middle of the table, a statement and a pen.
Read this interview at sass.studio.