Hello!

Today I'm thinking about a line from Elon Musk that people are buying Full Self-Driving with a car attached, not the other way around. People buying the outcome (it drives me places) instead of the tool (a car) is going to impact a lot more products, especially software. At a high level, this is how AI upends existing companies. Why does this matter so much for software? Because software teams spent decades making tools people use to get the outcomes they want. Photoshop is a good example. It has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels, but when you want to edit a photo you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." The tool sits between you and what you actually want. I've been chasing this idea for a while. Back in 2024, I wrote about how the continuous march of "more features, more UI" leaves people with more functions they don't know about and don't use, and how AI lets you control software with hundreds of features by just telling it what you want to do. Last month I pushed it further: start from the outcome ("here's the news you asked for") and let people engage with the tools later if they want to. Outcome first, tool second. The car example just makes it really concrete. Nobody wants a steering wheel, they want to get somewhere. As we've said for years, we don't call carpenters "hammer users." So if you're building software today, ask yourself: what's the "it drives me places" version of your product? Because if you don't ship that, someone else will, with your tool attached as an afterthought.

Ever fight a panda?


Ha, not personally, but I've spent plenty of time staring one down in a bamboo forest.

The real pandas in my writing show up in a couple of places worth mentioning. There's the WWF website I used as an example in Multi-Device Web Design, where a panda anchors a "Become a Paperless Member of WWF" call to action alongside sea turtles and polar bears. And then there's a panda that actually did end up in a fight, sort of.

Back when we were building Polar, one of our polls asked "What's Your Sushi-Style? Panda OR Penguin". So if you want to see a panda in a proper matchup, that's your best bet.

So no, I've never thrown hands with a panda. But I've put plenty of them on screen.