> One defining constraint must shape the product... Minecraft is built entirely from blocks. IKEA is flat-pack, self-assembly furniture.
I've been calling these things product primitives. I can't remember where I heard that term, but it refers to things like...
Blocks in Notion. Messages and conversations in Telegram. Frames and layers in Figma. Tweets in Twitter. Cells and sheets in Excel. Tools and layers in Photoshop. Commands in a CLI.
I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives. A bad product doesn't know what its primitives are. Or it has a very large number of primitives. It feels like everything in the product is some unique thing that works in its own unique way. So users have to learn a ton of different top-level primitives/concepts. It's confusing and intimidating and hard to teach. Ideally you just want one or two or three main primitives.
The complexity/power in an app comes from choosing powerful primitives that have depth, that are composable, etc. You can do a lot with Notion blocks. You can do a lot with Excel cells. You can do a lot with a CLI command. You can do a lot with a Minecraft block. There's depth there.
I think this philosophy might be oversimplified. Tana has basically two primitives (bullets and supertags) and manages to be devastatingly complex to use to the point you have to watch hours of tutorials to do very simple things. Conversely Google Maps has a lot of “primitives” but the UX is fairly tight for 90% of use cases.
The author really extracted the core tenants of exactly how my former research mentor and I ended up building our business.
We started with the second two points: our core technology was a sampler that enables arbitrary hierarchical Bayesian graph models for sparse data, our constraint was cpu bound tractable compute. The piece that took us the longest to discover was the fact that our end products need to be separate from our underlying technology.
We were given that advice in various words from many people even before we started but some lessons need to be lived to be learned.
I love the one page idea. If you can't spend the time to articulate a page worth of constraints, you're going to flail around discovering them as you go. And these aren't "bugs", they're "oh shit we're building the wrong thing" flaws.
I have no hard data to back it up, but in my experience, projects that take the time to put everyone on the same page conceptually (even if it's a 1 pager, high level, here's what we are and are not doing) end up succeeding far more often than projects that wing it. The wing it projects always end up disappointing everyone who had opinions but never bothered to articulate them.
It would have been great if the author could have provided a complete example of the constraints in action, I'm kinda lost on how the third one would look in practice
We are trying to design our kitchen for a renovation and I can see how these 3 constraints would be useful for us to do for something more about design than software.
> One defining constraint must shape the product... Minecraft is built entirely from blocks. IKEA is flat-pack, self-assembly furniture.
I've been calling these things product primitives. I can't remember where I heard that term, but it refers to things like...
Blocks in Notion. Messages and conversations in Telegram. Frames and layers in Figma. Tweets in Twitter. Cells and sheets in Excel. Tools and layers in Photoshop. Commands in a CLI.
I think what makes for good product design is having a very small number of primitives. A bad product doesn't know what its primitives are. Or it has a very large number of primitives. It feels like everything in the product is some unique thing that works in its own unique way. So users have to learn a ton of different top-level primitives/concepts. It's confusing and intimidating and hard to teach. Ideally you just want one or two or three main primitives.
The complexity/power in an app comes from choosing powerful primitives that have depth, that are composable, etc. You can do a lot with Notion blocks. You can do a lot with Excel cells. You can do a lot with a CLI command. You can do a lot with a Minecraft block. There's depth there.
I think this philosophy might be oversimplified. Tana has basically two primitives (bullets and supertags) and manages to be devastatingly complex to use to the point you have to watch hours of tutorials to do very simple things. Conversely Google Maps has a lot of “primitives” but the UX is fairly tight for 90% of use cases.
Vaguely feels like "Atomic Design" but applied to engineering.
what is Tana?
The author really extracted the core tenants of exactly how my former research mentor and I ended up building our business.
We started with the second two points: our core technology was a sampler that enables arbitrary hierarchical Bayesian graph models for sparse data, our constraint was cpu bound tractable compute. The piece that took us the longest to discover was the fact that our end products need to be separate from our underlying technology.
We were given that advice in various words from many people even before we started but some lessons need to be lived to be learned.
I love the one page idea. If you can't spend the time to articulate a page worth of constraints, you're going to flail around discovering them as you go. And these aren't "bugs", they're "oh shit we're building the wrong thing" flaws.
I have no hard data to back it up, but in my experience, projects that take the time to put everyone on the same page conceptually (even if it's a 1 pager, high level, here's what we are and are not doing) end up succeeding far more often than projects that wing it. The wing it projects always end up disappointing everyone who had opinions but never bothered to articulate them.
It would have been great if the author could have provided a complete example of the constraints in action, I'm kinda lost on how the third one would look in practice
We are trying to design our kitchen for a renovation and I can see how these 3 constraints would be useful for us to do for something more about design than software.
I’m gonna go do these…
Constraints are underrated.
The most elegant solutions typically arise not out of unbounded degrees of freedom, but building specifically with a constraint in mind.
I think that this goes with point 1: composing the one pager helps define those constraints.
I like these. I have never thought about it that way, but I guess that I generally have the same constraints.
What are hacker news constraints?
HTML 4.0
> The core tech must be separable from the product
The biggest product of the century thus, LLMs, are the core tech.
I don't doubt these rules have helped the author, but readers should be mindful when heeding them.
Agreed, but he is talking about limited-scope projects, that he probably does himself. That’s how I work, myself (these days).
In the past, I worked in teams, building much more ambitious projects, and these rules would likely not apply.
The product is automation; the tech is llms