Spraying software?

Yep, that was me earlier today. The cost of making software has dropped so far that we're producing it constantly, in every direction, and often without much aim.

Think about how it used to work. Back in 2006 I put together a list of user experience software tools, and it was something you could read in one sitting, with readers sending in the ones I'd missed. Software was scarce enough to catalog. Today a single person can have agents building in many parallel workspaces across multiple devices at the same time.

I picked "spraying" on purpose, since a sprayer covers a lot of ground but isn't very precise. When everyone steers their own agents, you end up shipping fifteen different ideas instead of one unified point of view.

So what do you do about it? Something I wrote back in 2009 applies surprisingly well here: you can't control almost anyone, but you can influence almost everyone. You won't hand-check everything agents produce, but you can shape it through shared context and defined roles.

Volume is easy now. Aim is where your effort should go.