What you called “that stuff” was
cerulean someone had carved out at the cost of their own blood.

That Stuff

Q · CODEXYou said this issue begins with a scene from a film. Why does that confrontation between a fashion magazine editor and a frumpy new hire lead you to today's IT industry?

PREFACE · 2026

In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy laughs at two belts that look alike. To her, they are the same object. Her attitude is that she has nothing to do with “that stuff,” such as fashion.

Miranda Priestly looks at the blue sweater Andy is wearing. It is not just blue. It is cerulean blue. She explains how that color appeared in collections, how it traveled from designers' choices through department stores and mass-market brands, finally reaching the discount-store sweater Andy picked up without a thought. Andy believed she had not chosen fashion, but she was wearing the repeatedly diluted product of decisions made by the very people she mocked.

Andy relies on the choices of the people who made her sweater, yet sees no reason to learn about that process.

Now replace the sweater with a service.

The crude app in your hand, the checkout screen that keeps orders flowing, the unobtrusively continuous animation, the architecture that prevents data from disappearing during an outage, the placement of a button that saves users from wondering what to do next. None of it spontaneously appeared one day. Countless engineers and designers carved it out through failure, revision, and struggle.

Even that crude service you call “that stuff” is cerulean blue, carved out by countless engineers and designers at the cost of their own blood.

Yet at some point in the twenty-first century, code quality, design quality, the question of what actually has to work in a service, architecture, and algorithms all became “that stuff.” The tables and sentences used to report what had been made became more important than what had been made. Planning and management seemed to be the only jobs never called “that stuff.”

Then let me ask.

Is a planner who never thinks about “that stuff” an efficient person? Or someone who does not even do that stuff? If the latter, why should that person exist in the company?

The Epicurean Trap

Q · CODEXAre you saying planners should write the code and do the design themselves?

TRILEMMA · 2026

No. That would be a consolidation of jobs. What I am asking about is the qualification to judge.

A chief surgeon need not personally perform every operation. That does not mean they need not know what surgery is. A commander need not fire every gun. But they cannot order an attack without knowing what bullets do to people. A planner, likewise, need not write every line of code or draw every pixel. They must, however, know what their decisions demand of the code, the interface, and operations.

Let us borrow the form of an old paradox handed down under the name of Epicurus. This exchange does not appear in his surviving writings; it survives in the form later attributed to him by Lactantius. Take the form that asked how an omnipotent, benevolent god could coexist with evil in the world, and apply it to a planner's decision-making authority.

If a planner does not understand “that stuff,” they are Incompetent: incapable of judgment.

If they know it matters but erase it from their decisions and dump it on practitioners, they are a Deceiver: someone who disguises responsibility.

If they believe it has nothing to do with their role and they need not even know it, they are NULL: the reason they need decision-making power has not yet been entered.

A planner who does not know “that stuff” is incompetent. One who knows but erases it is deceptive. One who believes they need not even know it must start by planning anew why they should exist in the organization.

There is one more exit.

If you do not know, you do not have to do it. If you lack the ability, all the more reason not to. But you must lay down the sword along with it. The moment someone who will neither understand nor take responsibility clings to decision-making power alone, the division of labor becomes a hostage situation, not command.

Delegating Contempt

Q · CODEXDid you invent this paradox in your head, or have you actually witnessed it?

WORKPLACE · 2026

I experienced this directly while working as the company’s iOS developer.

Apparently, the planner considered themselves too noble to do customer support. That must have been why the lowly iOS developer caught their eye. Defining screens, deciding features, and finding out what was technically required all became miscellaneous chores. Every one of those chores came over under the name of “that stuff” developers were supposed to handle on their own.

Along with writing code, I took on the work and responsibility the planner had dismissed as “that stuff.”

The strange thing was that even as planning duties disappeared one by one, the title of planner did not. Developers decided what to build, developers and designers worked out how it would look, and developers dealt directly with user complaints—yet the authority and the title remained in a different seat.

At this point, the question cannot help becoming harsh.

You do not develop. You do not design. You do not think about where users enter, which screens they pass through, or how they complete a purchase. Then what do you do at this company besides breathe?

Have you ever thought about why major commerce services relentlessly reduce the number of screens before purchase and the points where users drop off? If you do not know what data, design, and competing interests go into removing a single button, you at least have no right to call it “that stuff.”

The planner treated the work as worthless and treated me the same way when I took it on.

The Company with Only Two People Left

Q · CODEXDid the organization correct that delegation?

CLOSED DYAD · 2026

No. Someone who agreed with that attitude arrived. Those who disagreed left one by one, and the organization grew smaller.

The fact that there were fewer people was named efficiency. The disappearance of dissent was named consensus. The state of having only two people left was named operational viability.

Two people can run a company, and one person can build an entire product. I, too, get paid to handle planning, design, and development together. When headcount falls, you need to check who has taken on the work and responsibilities of those who left.

When the work of those who leave is assigned to those who remain, lower payroll costs alone cannot demonstrate higher productivity without accounting for that workload.

Writing down their conversation in that office as I remember hearing it, it went like this.

“We've proved we can run the company and make a living with just the two of us now. This is productivity,” said the developer who had driven everyone else out.

“Wow, that's wonderful,” the planner replied.

I will also record here, as I remember them, what other people said about those two.

“Tell them to work alone if they want to work. It's obvious they'll fail later in life, with not a single person beside them they can trust.” That was the head of development who left before I did.

“I can't take any more of this abusive talk.” That was the web developer who left before I did.

“This is how an organization collapses when someone who has never wielded power starts swinging a sword.” That was a colleague in administration who left before I did.

After watching those two, I studied psychology. What on earth made them function that way?

My conclusion was not ambiguous. The planner's behavior overlapped with the mechanisms described in narcissistic personality disorder, and the developer's behavior overlapped with those described in obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

The two different patterns converged at one point: shrinking the organization to protect the places where they felt inferior. Pushing out, one by one, anyone who opposed them or could replace them, making the company smaller until no one else remained to be expelled.

They did not reduce the company to the smallest viable operating unit. They built an organization small enough to keep their vulnerabilities from showing.

And in the office where only the two of them remained, they called it productivity.

Whether it really was productivity is for you to judge. If you are a business owner, though, I hope you have contracts and lawyers ready to reclaim your company if that judgment proves wrong.

Well, what follows is another story. The two were astonishingly in sync. So much so that I wondered how two people, each with a spouse, could reinforce each other's convictions so quickly in an office. I have my own analysis of how their families and relationships affected that rapport. But I will not put that into this article.

Still, if you are ahead of your partner professionally, or have lived in more affluent circumstances, it is worth considering. Is the gap between the two of you being translated into inferiority and a hunger for power outside the home? And when will the price of that imbalance, passed off to others outside, come crashing into the home?

The Ability to Lay Down the Sword

Q · CODEXIs this an argument for driving incompetent people out of organizations?

FOURTH EXIT · 2026

There is no need even for that. If you do not want to do that stuff, do not do it. If you cannot do it, do not do it. Not everyone has to be good at everything.

But you must lay down the sword you should not be wielding.

I consider a leader capable when they recognize what they do not know. They should set the objective, entrust the method to those who know better, and ask questions without deciding the answers in advance. They should take responsibility for the result while letting practitioners decide how to do the work.

The handling of military command offers another example of this difference.

Early in the German–Soviet War, Stalin's purges and centralization weakened the Soviet military disastrously. He remained the supreme ruler and never relinquished final strategic authority. But after failures in the war, he allowed discussion and feedback again, however limited, and made greater use of the General Staff and experienced commanders in planning and execution. The German army, by contrast, initially benefited from a culture of mission command—superiors set objectives and commanders in the field decided the methods—but Hitler's interventions and insistence on his orders increasingly squeezed that discretion as the war went on.

This alone cannot explain why the Soviet Union won or Germany lost. War is not that simple. But it is sufficient as an example of the difference between a leader's ability to admit what they do not know and the urge to swing a sword while remaining ignorant.

If a peacetime planner never learns what even Stalin learned, however little, through failure, what is that planner?

The Lineage of Invisible Things

Q · CODEXYou said people obsessed with “that stuff” changed history. On what grounds?

INVISIBLE · 2026

Many people have spent time refining unseen details and still failed. Some waste time and money on details users do not need.

I look at how that work changed the user experience and the speed and reliability of the system. I also look at whether later products adopted it as a standard.

After dropping out of college, Steve Jobs attended a calligraphy class. It seemed to have no practical use at the time, but he later recalled personally carrying that experience into the Macintosh's multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts. Users do not see the font-processing architecture inside an operating system. They do know that, as a result, sentences on a computer screen look different than before.

There are also records of Jobs insisting that even the arrangement of the Macintosh's internal circuit board be tidy. A buyer would rarely see that board. But its makers knew. Demanding order on hidden surfaces is not always the right business decision. It does, however, show what Apple called a product: not merely a shell, but an object encompassing even its invisible interior.

An even more famous legend attaches to John Carmack's name: the fast inverse square root and the bizarre constant 0x5f3759df made widely known through the Quake III source code. Often introduced as Carmack's magical line, the algorithm has an older lineage, and the invention of that constant is traced to Greg Walsh. Nor does the claim hold that today's 3D industry would not exist without that single line of code.

This method of calculation improved as it passed through the hands of several engineers. Describing it as one magical piece of code by Carmack once again dismisses their work on architecture, tools, and performance as “that stuff.”

There is also the famous story that someone asked Michelangelo why he painted even unseen corners of the Sistine Chapel so meticulously, and he answered, “I know.” Firm contemporary evidence for it is difficult to find, however. So let us use it only as a later fable describing a craftsman's attitude, not as historical evidence.

In that fable, I read the arrogance of refusing to overlook a flaw even when others cannot see it. I believe that attitude can produce better results.

You still need to check whether those refinements make a real difference to users.

The Price of Mutiny

Q · CODEXYou said you saw how a profession's value is actually decided even before you entered IT.

MUTINY · 2026

This was when I was a journalist.

Unable to endure an extraordinarily excessive workload any longer, the entire editorial design team entered the president's office. It was collective mutiny. The result was unexpected. The design team was guaranteed an on-time departure except for the two days when all the company's monthly magazines went to deadline.

A month later, the editor-in-chief of the editorial department exploded over drinks. It was impossible for six people to close three monthly magazines and one daily newspaper every month while doing the reporting too. Everyone was working overtime every day, the editor said.

The result was the opposite. The entire editorial department was ordered not to leave before ten at night for a month. It was a retaliatory work order for having offended someone, rather than a formal disciplinary measure. It resembled making soldiers stand in an office in full combat gear instead of imposing an official punishment.

The design team gained an on-time departure, while the editorial department had to stay until ten at night for a month.

A company first calculates how easily it believes it can replace the mutineers, rather than how desperate their mutiny is. The outcome was divided not by the size of their anger, but by the profession's bargaining power and its perceived replacement cost.

Turn to today's IT industry and the roles appear reversed. Native iOS and Android developers, web frontend and backend developers, and designers now stand where the editorial department once stood, detained until ten at night. Increasingly, planning and management occupy the position the organization believes it must appease first.

Perhaps it used to be the other way around. But after the arrival of supposedly great and omnipotent AI, market perceptions changed rapidly. The labor of shaping code, architecture, and pixels has not actually disappeared. What AI changed was less replaceability itself than the ranking of who is believed replaceable.

The moment executives believe development and design can be replaced at the push of a button, those professions' mutiny looks less threatening. Meanwhile, those who define requirements and occupy the reporting channels still look like the organization's mouth and ears. Whether that belief is right becomes apparent only after the system stops.

In the two incidents I experienced, management treated the protests differently according to which profession it thought was easier to replace.

What Does a Planner Create?

Q · CODEXSo far, you have interrogated planners. Then what kind of real planner do you recognize and respect?

REAL PLANNER · 2026

In Choi Jang-soon's The Habits of a Planner, a book I enjoyed, there is a passage to this effect: planners should think less about living long in the flesh than about surviving long in their creations. They should step outside whenever they can, with alcohol and cigarettes for company, and watch the way the world turns.

What a ruthless and precise premise.

I read that passage as an instruction to leave desks and meeting rooms and observe the world. If practitioners bleed because of your decisions, I take it to mean that you must share responsibility for those decisions.

A good planner does not despise implementation. They translate the world they have observed into the language of implementation and ask what is impossible, expensive, and dangerous in the process. When they hear the answers, they revise the plan. If they cannot revise it, they explain the cost themselves. If it fails, they do not hide behind practitioners' names.

By contrast, the output of someone who merely fills Excel cells without observations, judgment, or responsibility of their own remains “that stuff” forever. Residue no one would notice had been replaced by AI.

Only when you abandon not bodily comfort but mental complacency, and have the fierce determination to implement the world you have seen to the very end, does it become “something never seen anywhere before.”

A bad planner tries to immortalize their title.

A good planner tries to immortalize their creation.

Which are you?

Besides breathing, what is the reason you should exist in this organization?

The Door Is Open

Q · CODEXWhy do you keep making and conceiving things, even while saying creators' bargaining power has weakened and the price has grown heavier?

EXIT · 2026

I think the price creators pay is heavier now. Even so, I create and conceive. Because the moment those who make things lay down their hands, the only people left will be those who call others' work “that stuff.”

I will keep making things, but I have no intention of staying and putting up with unfair treatment.

In Letter 26 of the Moral Letters, Seneca connects contemplating death with contemplating freedom. And he writes: “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”

In Letter 70, he writes that the wise person lives not as long as they can, but as long as they ought. Seneca's exit included literal death. This article does not recommend going that far. What it borrows is his gaze into the heart of power.

When I believe I cannot quit, it becomes harder to refuse unreasonable demands.

In modern organizations, the door is usually less final than that. You can return decision-making power. You can refuse an unjust order. You can step down. You can leave the company. If you cannot wield the sword, you can lay it down; under someone who will not lay it down, you can leave the room first.

So the belief that “there is an emergency exit” is not dangerous pessimism. It is an existential defense mechanism for modern people suffering from claustrophobia. Someone who knows there is an exit does not mistake every demand inside the room for an order essential to survival. They can lift their head before an unjust instruction and reclaim the name of their labor, dismissed as “that stuff.”

By an exit, I mean the choice to leave an organization or relationship that holds my life hostage and demands obedience.

I can leave that organization.

Remembering that I can leave makes refusing an unjust instruction less frightening.