The 'Soul' of Software in an AI-First World
Original: Someone behind the software
Why This Matters
As AI accelerates shipping, product identity and editorial coherence become competitive differentiators.
Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen argues that good products carry their makers' perspective, and warns that agent-driven, additive development is eroding that character into shapeless feature collections.
In a personal essay, Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen pushes back against the 'software factory' model—collect requirements, ship features, measure output—and its latest evolution: fully automated agent pipelines. His argument is simple but pointed. Two teams with identical customers and identical tooling can build radically different things, because the difference lives in judgment, not process.
At Linear, that means valuing intuition over data. Not gut feeling untethered from evidence, but perspective earned through experience, customer conversations, and the willingness to make calls. 'The intuition is your point of view on something,' he writes, 'and forcing to use your judgment, not hide behind faceless data.'
Saarinen says he increasingly finds even successful products feeling 'messy'—not broken, but shapeless. The pattern: changes are additive rather than clarifying. Each new capability makes sense in isolation; together they produce what he calls 'Frankenstein's monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.' He ties this directly to how work is organized today—individuals and agents operating independent micro-factories, each output locally rational, collectively incoherent.
The essay ends on a cautious hope: as making software gets easier, creators might finally have room to develop real perspective and follow it further—if they choose to.