All that's left is care

Why giving a shit matters

At SpecStory, we’re focused on helping teams build software. And of course, we ourselves are a team that’s building software. So we get to live through the same roller coaster rides as all of you as we adopt AI codegen in our workflows.

One question we ask ourselves is what are we building that’s defensible? What’s actually worth building. Especially given that in many cases, software that used to take weeks or months to code and ship can now be built in days or hours. Along these lines, Lenny shared a video from Alex Komoroske where he argues that in the age of AI, taste is the most important thing.

I’d like to take a slightly different angle on this because taste is subjective, taste is inactionable, taste is whimsical, and taste is something you have or you don’t.

Something more concrete than taste, and something that we can all practice, is caring. Caring deeply about who we’re building for, what they’re trying to accomplish, the pains, challenges, and triumphs they face, and the small interactions that make all of these things better.

Taste

• Comes from within.

• If you don’t like it, tough.

• Can change as the wind blows.

• Form > Function

Caring

• Focuses on others.

• If you don’t like it, tell me.

• Can be steadfast as everything else changes.

• Function > Form

PostHog, which we use for free today, proactively sent me this email which anticipates my concerns and addresses them directly and helpfully.

Caring is a way to generate long term value. One of the best examples of this is Amazon, a company obsessed with caring (about customers). In most cases you’d be hard pressed to argue that Amazon has great taste— their UI designs have been utilitarian since day 1, AWS services all emphasize function over form, and their brand identity is practically nonexistent. Yet, despite this lack of aesthetic refinement, Amazon’s relentless obsession with customers has made it one of the most successful companies in history.

Now I’m presenting these at odds with each other and making the case for caring. But we can find examples of companies that have won on taste alone— every successful luxury brand. And we can find examples of companies that have a blend of both. Apple is known for its taste (along with its “you’re holding it wrong” attitude), but they clearly care about all the details that make their products usable and useful for their customers.

But here’s the rub— you can’t care about everything. When I talk about Amazon as a caring company, I mean that strictly with respect to their customers. They are notoriously uncaring about their warehouse workers and their employees. Or said another way, for better or worse they put their customers’ needs far ahead of their employees’.

For SpecStory, caring is our approach. Specifically, we care deeply about the people who are breaking new ground today using AI code generation to build software. And this means sweating over issues they encounter when using our extension in the wild (even if that means that they’re saving multi-directory Workspaces as files while running Cursor on Windows with WSL). In fact we think of fixing real world issues as one way of creating value in SpecStory above and beyond what anyone could do if they just prompted an AI coding agent to “make a Cursor extension to save and share chat histories.”

But things move fast, and the world evolves quickly, so we need to get even clearer about what we care about. What happens when software is built in new ways, beyond the current AI codegen tools? What happens if we’re wrong about the timeframe for the widespread adoption of coding agents? What happens when different groups of AI-powered software builders have diverging needs?

We all need to figure out our path to creating long term value, and there are examples to draw on where tastemaking or caring, obsessively, have lead to that value. But I’d argue that “be tasteful” is less actionable than “be caring”.