TL;DR
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In an essay, Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen argues that a product’s character comes from its makers’ experience, judgment and choices, not just its features. He says AI agents may make software production easier, but warns that independently produced changes can leave products feeling fragmented if teams lack a shared perspective.
Karri Saarinen, Linear’s co-founder, argues in an essay that software reflects the experience and judgment of the people who build it, warning that AI agents and faster development could make products more fragmented when teams lack a shared view of what they should be. His piece is an argument about product design, not a report of a new Linear feature or a measured study of AI’s effects.
Saarinen writes that products can convey their makers’ perspective even when users do not know who those people are. In his view, software is not simply the result of gathering requirements, building features and checking whether they work. Teams working with similar customers and technologies can produce very different products because they interpret problems differently and make different decisions about how to solve them.
He describes Linear’s approach as valuing intuition over process or data, while defining intuition as judgment developed through experience rather than preference without evidence. Saarinen says the team spoke with people across companies and roles before launching Linear. Those conversations, alongside the founders’ own frustrations with existing software, helped shape their understanding of what mattered.
In the essay, Saarinen says a feature can function correctly and still make a product worse if it does not fit the whole. He argues that product character emerges from what makers pay attention to, what they choose not to build and what they continue improving after a feature works. The person making the call, he writes, also needs to remain close to customers to learn whether the decision was right.
Why Product Coherence Is at Stake
Saarinen’s concern is that easier software production may increase the pace of additions without improving the underlying product. He says many products appear to accumulate capabilities rather than rethink existing ones, leaving them with more things that work but less of a unified point of view. This is his assessment of a broader product-design trend, not a quantified finding or a claim about every company.
The argument matters as teams adopt coding agents and other tools that can help individuals produce changes independently. Saarinen compares that work pattern to separate “software factories”: each change may make sense on its own, but the combined result can feel disjointed. For users, the issue is not simply how quickly features arrive. It is whether the product remains understandable and consistent as it grows.
His essay does not say that automation inevitably harms design. Instead, Saarinen hopes easier production will give makers more room to study problems and refine solutions. The tension he identifies is between the ability to produce more and the discipline to decide what belongs together.
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Saarinen’s View of Product Judgment
The essay starts from Saarinen’s experience at Linear, a software company whose product is used to manage work and projects. He says that before Linear launched, its team spoke with people in different roles and organizations about how they worked. He presents that research as a way to improve the founders’ initial perspective, not as a substitute for it.
Saarinen also clarifies what he means by intuition. He rejects the idea that it means making choices based only on personal taste. Instead, he describes it as a point of view shaped by working on a problem, hearing from customers, making mistakes and learning what to notice. That framing is central to his case: good judgment depends on both accumulated experience and continued contact with users.
He connects the issue to the organization of software work. When individuals use agents to produce changes separately, Saarinen says, the product can become an average of those outputs unless the people involved share a perspective. The essay raises this as a risk, not as evidence that a particular agent, team or Linear product has already suffered that outcome.
“At Linear, we have always valued intuition over process or data.”
— Karri Saarinen, Linear co-founder
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What the Essay Does Not Establish
Saarinen offers a personal argument grounded in his experience, but the source does not provide independent research showing that AI agents are already making software products less coherent. It gives no measured comparison of products built with and without agents, and does not identify specific companies or examples behind his observation that products are becoming messy.
The essay also does not set out a process for measuring product character or deciding when a feature damages coherence. It remains unclear how widely the organizational pattern he describes applies, or what safeguards would prevent separately produced changes from pulling a product in different directions. The source material does not give the essay’s publication date.
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How Teams Respond to Faster Production
Saarinen does not announce a new company policy, product change or formal recommendation in the source material. His closing hope is that lower barriers to making software will leave teams with more time to understand problems and keep shaping solutions until their parts fit together.
For readers following the issue, the next evidence will come from how software teams organize agent-assisted work and whether they can maintain a consistent product direction as the volume of changes grows. The essay itself does not specify a timeline, benchmark or follow-up development.
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Key Questions
What is Saarinen’s main argument?
He argues that software reflects its makers’ judgment and that product character comes from more than working features. Choices about what to build, leave out and continue refining shape the overall experience.
Is the essay an announcement about Linear?
No. The source is a personal essay by Linear co-founder Karri Saarinen. It does not announce a new Linear product, feature or company policy.
Does Saarinen say AI agents will make products worse?
He raises a risk, not a certainty. Saarinen says independently produced changes could weaken coherence when they are not guided by a shared product perspective, while also expressing hope that easier development can give makers more room to refine their work.
What does Saarinen mean by intuition?
He describes intuition as judgment built through experience, customer conversations and mistakes, rather than a choice based only on personal preference or unsupported instinct.
Source: hn
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