AI era skills: Why cultivating agency matters more than job titles | Max Schoening (Notion)

频道: Lenny's Podcast
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCO-D3pkviM
原文语言: en
统计: 共 130 轮 · Max 72 · Lenny 58

[0:00] Max

Before it was very easy to always say, well, I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue. We're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips, the thing that matters is agency. I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world.

以前我们很容易就说：哎呀，这事我永远做不来，因为我缺某项技能。但现在我们意识到，就算你随手就能调用各种技能，真正起决定作用的是能动性（agency）。我觉得能动性在这个世界上的分布并不均匀。

[0:14] Lenny

Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

对于一个想在自己身上培养出这种能动性的人，你有什么建议吗？

[0:18] Max

I tell this to myself. Could you drive notion like it's stolen? One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. It just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things. If you think about your job a couple years ago, what's most changed?

我也常这么对自己说：你能不能像开一辆偷来的车那样去驱动 Notion？有一天你醒来突然意识到，这个世界是由一群并不比你聪明的人搭建起来的。这个认知会真正唤醒你，让你明白你是可以去改变事情的。如果回想几年前你的工作，你觉得变化最大的是什么？

[0:32] Max

The first 10% of every project are now free. It takes almost no effort to now build the first version of a startup.

现在每个项目的头 10% 都变得几乎不费力了。如今搭一个创业项目的第一个版本，几乎不需要花什么力气。

[0:39] Lenny

Taste comes up a lot now.

现在「品味」这个词被提到的频率特别高。

[0:40] Max

Taste actually means you're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain inroup whether they're going to like it or not. You just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model.

品味其实意味着你能在脑子里跑一台虚拟机：给你一个想法，你就能预测对于某个特定群体来说，他们会不会喜欢它。你只要不断地练、不断地做。这几乎就像在训练一个模型。

[0:51] Lenny

What do you think matters to building a successful product?

你觉得打造一款成功的产品，关键在于什么？

[0:54] Max

All the great products have something tiny that is a superpower. one tiny core that is so exceptionally good. One of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of if I just add one more thing to the product, it will be finally great. That never works.

所有伟大的产品都有一个非常微小的东西，但那个东西是它的超能力——一个小小的内核，好到超乎寻常。最大的陷阱之一，就是你陷入这样一个循环：只要我再往产品里加一个功能，它就终于会变得很棒。这种思路从来都行不通。

[1:08] Lenny

Give this hot take on universal basic income.

来给我们一个关于「全民基本收入」（universal basic income）的犀利观点吧。

[1:10] Max

We already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. Today my guest is Max Shying. Max is a hard person to describe. He was a product manager at Google. He ran the design team at Heroku. He was a design leader and an engineer at GitHub under Natt Freriedman. He's also a two-time founder and is now head of product at Notion. He is one of the most successful AI forward product leaders out there and as you'll soon see, one of the deepest thinkers on how AI impacts how we build and how we use software. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennisproass.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Max Shing. Max, welcome to the podcast.

我们其实已经有全民基本收入了，它叫「知识工作」。今天我的嘉宾是 Max Schoening。Max 是个很难一句话描述清楚的人。他曾是 Google 的产品经理，曾在 Heroku 带设计团队，在 GitHub 担任设计负责人兼工程师，当时是在 Nat Friedman 手下。他还两度创业，如今是 Notion 的产品负责人。他是当今最成功的、以 AI 为导向的产品领袖之一，而且你很快就会看到，他也是关于「AI 如何改变我们构建软件、使用软件的方式」这个话题上思考得最深的人之一。在我们正式开始之前，别忘了去 lennyspod.com 看看，那里有一整套疯狂的优惠，是专门给 Lenny's newsletter 订阅者的。好，下面有请 Max Schoening。Max，欢迎来到播客。

[1:57] Max

Thank you for having me.

谢谢你邀请我。

[1:58] Lenny

I am so excited to have you here. I feel like there's this quote I think about when I think about you uh and you being on this podcast. It comes from the Bible. And just paraphrasing, the quote is, "I was made for such a time as this." I feel like there's this all this talk about roles merging, designers becoming PMs, engineers, everyone's the same. The ven diagrams collapsing. You've been that for a long time. It's like hard to even describe what you are and what you've done. You've done all the things. So, I feel like you have such a unique insight into where things are heading. I want to start with just kind of this broad question. What have you seen about where things are going for product teams, for product building, as AI becomes more powerful, as we integrate it more into our workflows? And I ask you this because I've heard from so many people at Notion that you are the reason that designers are shipping code, PMs are shipping code. You're not just living in the future, you're like pushing the whole team and company to live in the future. And so, so coming back to the question just like what are you seeing about where things are going? What will change? What will people realize in the next few months, years that you're already seeing?

我太兴奋能请到你了。每次想到你、想到你来上这个播客，我脑子里都会浮现一句话，它出自《圣经》。我大致转述一下，这句话是：「我就是为了这样一个时代而生的。」我感觉现在大家都在谈各种角色在融合——设计师变成 PM、变成工程师，所有人都一样，那些维恩图在塌缩、在重叠。而你早在很久以前就是这种状态了。简直很难用一句话描述你是什么、你做过什么——你什么都干过。所以我觉得你对于「事情正往哪个方向走」有非常独特的洞见。我想先从一个比较宏观的问题开始：随着 AI 越来越强大、随着我们把它越来越深地整合进工作流，你观察到产品团队、产品构建会往哪个方向走？我之所以问你这个，是因为我从很多 Notion 的人那里听说，是你让设计师开始交付代码、PM 开始交付代码。你不只是活在未来，你简直是在推着整个团队和公司一起活在未来。所以回到这个问题：你观察到事情正往哪走？什么会改变？在接下来几个月、几年里，人们会意识到哪些你已经看到的东西？

[3:00] Max

Well, first of all, when you said a quote from the Bible, I was I was very curious where this was going to

嗯，首先，你刚说「一句出自《圣经》的话」时，我特别好奇这要往哪儿引。

[3:07] Max

It's the first time I've coded the Bible on this podcast. I think I wouldn't take credit for the designers at notion and PMs at notion now code. I think that would have probably happened anyways. But I can tell you the origin story of it which is when I joined notion we were building a lot of chat interfaces and we were designing the chat interfaces in Figma and my there's this great talk by Brett Victor uh stop drawing dead fish which essentially is I I mean the the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. uh you have to feel the the AI to some degree. And so, uh, two designers, myself, just put together the worst possible playground you could think of of a small codebase that is very LLM friendly, used the tools that LLMs are very good at using. And then we moved all of our prototyping for the specifically the chat interfaces to that. And just to understand this playground concept, uh, essentially this is an idea of people work within this separate kind of area with AI tools versus like their whole notion code base making it really easy to get started and try stuff.

这是我第一次在这个播客上「编码」《圣经》。我觉得「Notion 的设计师和 PM 现在都写代码」这件事，我不会把功劳揽到自己身上，那大概反正都会发生。但我可以告诉你它的起源故事：我刚加入 Notion 的时候，我们在做大量的聊天界面，而我们当时是在 Figma 里设计这些聊天界面。Brett Victor 有一个很棒的演讲，叫《Stop Drawing Dead Fish（别再画死鱼了）》——本质上，一张聊天界面的静态图，就是这里说的那条「死鱼」。你必须在某种程度上去「感受」这个 AI。于是，两位设计师加上我，凑了一个你能想象到的最烂的 playground：一个很小的、对 LLM 非常友好的代码库，用的都是 LLM 特别擅长使用的工具。然后我们把所有针对聊天界面的原型工作都搬到了那上面。为了让大家理解这个 playground 的概念——本质上它的想法是，人们在这样一块独立的区域里、用 AI 工具来工作，而不是直接在整个 Notion 代码库里干活，这样上手和试东西就变得非常容易。

[4:21] Max

Yes. And that was the first version. It sort of aligned with model capabilities at the time. We don't always use maybe at notion sort of the the main codebase is not always the most agent uh friendly because uh iterations and a decade of of of patterns. And so we optimized for okay how can we make this the least scary and most oneshotable so that people would just have to overcome this sort of oh I the fear of the terminal but then it just becomes chatting and uh we recreated a bunch of the patterns and UIs that exist in that playground now the good news is that's just to get people on the treadmill because as model capabilities get better now we have the same designers npms also just contributing to the production codebase to a lesser degree of course, but like you can see where the trend is headed as model capabilities get better. The the the amount of work that you can do is uh obviously going to increase exponentially. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor work OS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by work OS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single signon, skim, arback, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SAS. Literally, every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seedstage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Workos allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. go to works.com to make your app enterprise ready today.

对。那是第一个版本。它跟当时模型的能力是大致匹配的。在 Notion，主代码库并不总是对 agent 最友好的，因为它经过了十年的迭代和各种沉淀下来的模式。所以我们做的优化是：怎么能让这东西尽量不吓人、尽量能「一次跑通」（one-shot），让大家只需要克服「我怕用终端」这种恐惧，然后它就变成纯粹的聊天了。我们还在那个 playground 里重建了一堆现有的模式和 UI。好消息是，这只是为了让大家先上跑步机——因为随着模型能力越来越强，现在同样这批设计师和 PM 也开始为生产代码库做贡献了，当然程度要小一些，但你能看到这个趋势的走向：随着模型能力提升，你能完成的工作量显然会呈指数级增长。本期节目由我们本季的冠名赞助商 WorkOS 带来。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay 以及其他数百家成功的公司有什么共同点？它们全都由 WorkOS 驱动。如果你在为企业客户做产品，你一定体会过集成单点登录（SSO）、SCIM、RBAC、审计日志以及大公司要求的其他功能时的痛苦。WorkOS 把这些「卡死交易的障碍」变成了即插即用的 API，背后是一个专为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。我投资的每一家创业公司，只要开始往中大型市场扩张，最后基本都会和 WorkOS 合作，因为他们是最好的。无论你是想拿下第一个企业客户的种子期创业公司，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是让你「企业级就绪」、解锁增长的最快路径。它本质上就是「企业功能版的 Stripe」。访问 workos.com 即可开始，或者直接去他们的 Slack，那里有真正的工程师在等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你能用赏心悦目的 API、详尽的文档和顺滑的开发者体验更快地构建产品。今天就去 workos.com，让你的应用做好企业级准备。

[6:31] Lenny

Maybe give us a sense of where things are today like how much are designers shipping stuff PMs and then just what do you see about where things might be heading seeing all this actually happening in at a company like notion? I I feel so uncomfortable predicting the future in terms of where things are heading because well predicting exponentials is really hard. But I'll take the stab at it is very very useful for designers to move from manipulating Figma documents into code. That has always been useful. I've always been camp designers should code. uh at a in a previous life I I led design and product at GitHub and GitHub designers before LLMs contributed to to GitHub I think in the top contributors to to GitHub itself like 10% were designers right now processes are sort of breaking uh one is we have designers who now mostly code and prototype in in code and then they are asked by other teams uh in marketing and so on to reverse engineer that in Figma because they use that to create assets for videos and so on and so obviously that is kind of silly right that seems like busy work on the pushing to production I think it's a spectrum obviously small changes styling tweaks and so on it's a given that you can just do that now I do have a general sort of maybe issue with vibe coding uh in the sense of I I don't feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months I think the maybe the amount of software has, but it's very very hard to find software that is is reliable. And so the way we see it is it's not so much about pushing to production and having designers deploy.

也许你可以给我们讲讲现在事情发展到什么程度了，比如设计师现在到底在多大程度上交付东西、PM 呢，然后在 Notion 这样的公司里真切看到这一切正在发生，你觉得事情可能往哪走？说实话，我对预测未来、预测事情往哪走这件事感到非常不自在，因为预测指数级的东西真的很难。但我还是斗胆说一下：让设计师从摆弄 Figma 文档转向写代码，这是非常非常有用的。它一直都很有用。我一直是「设计师应该会写代码」这一派的。在我之前的职业生涯里，我在 GitHub 带设计和产品团队，而早在 LLM 出现之前，GitHub 的设计师就为 GitHub 本身贡献代码——我记得在 GitHub 的顶级贡献者里，大概有 10% 是设计师。现在一些流程开始有点崩了。其一是：我们有些设计师现在大部分时间在用代码来写原型，结果市场营销之类的其他团队反过来要求他们在 Figma 里「逆向还原」一遍，因为那些团队要用 Figma 来制作视频素材之类的东西。这显然有点傻，对吧？看起来就是无效劳动。至于「推到生产环境」这件事，我觉得它是一个光谱：小改动、样式微调之类的，现在你能直接做，这是理所当然的。但我对 vibe coding 确实有一个笼统的、也许算是不满的地方：我并不觉得过去 12 个月里软件的「质量」提升了多少。软件的「数量」也许是涨了，但要找到真正可靠的软件还是非常非常难。所以在我们看来，重点并不在于「推到生产环境、让设计师去部署」。

[8:17] Max

It's about them thinking and designing in the medium that will actually end up being the real thing once engineering takes it over.

重点在于，让他们在那个「一旦工程团队接手、就会真正成为最终产物」的媒介里去思考、去设计。

[8:25] Lenny

There's all this talk about designers should be shipping code, PM should be shipping code. And then there's the flip side of because engineers can move so fast. There's so much more happening. Things are moving all the time, designers and PMs are squeezed more and more because it's hard to stay on top of all these things that are constantly shipping. And so maybe it doesn't actually make sense for designers and PMs to be spending time coding and instead their time is better spent making sure things are moving in a direction that makes sense for the business. It's cohesive. What's your thoughts on just that balance? I actually don't care at all whether designers write code that lands in production. The reason I like thinking in code is because it forces you to consider the medium. If then all of that gets thrown out, great. So, for example, I think the two extremes would be if a PM or a designer knows how to tweak with pick your favorite, they're all the same, codeex, cloud code, whatever. If they know how to tweak small details of the UI, but they don't understand how an agent loop works, I would much rather take the designer or PM that deeply has an affinity for understanding how agent loops work and can design those than someone who can sort of write traditional software uh and and tweak styles. And that's really hard because I think the only way that you can actually get to understanding agent loops is if you build them in the material that they're made of, which is currently code, and increasingly so if you look at all the coding harnesses, basically the operating systems of the '90s, right?

现在大家都在谈「设计师应该交付代码、PM 应该交付代码」。但还有另一面：正因为工程师能跑得这么快，发生的事情多得多，东西一直在变、一直在出，设计师和 PM 反而被越挤越紧，因为很难跟上这些不断在交付的东西。所以也许让设计师和 PM 花时间写代码其实并不合理，他们的时间更应该花在确保事情往一个对业务有意义、且整体连贯的方向走上。对于这种平衡，你怎么看？我其实完全不在乎设计师写的代码最后会不会进生产环境。我之所以喜欢「用代码来思考」，是因为它逼着你去认真考虑这个媒介本身。如果之后那些代码全被扔掉了，那太好了。比如说，我觉得两个极端是这样的：一个 PM 或设计师如果知道怎么去微调——随你挑你喜欢的工具，它们都差不多，Codex、Claude Code，随便哪个——如果他们知道怎么微调 UI 的小细节，但并不理解一个 agent loop 是怎么运作的；那我宁愿要那种从骨子里就对「理解 agent loop 如何运作」有亲和力、并且能去设计这些 loop 的设计师或 PM，而不是那种会写传统软件、会调样式的人。这其实很难，因为我觉得你真正理解 agent loop 的唯一办法，就是用它们本身所构成的材料去搭建它们——而那个材料目前就是代码，而且会越来越是。你看现在所有这些编程的「harness」，它们基本上就是 90 年代的操作系统，对吧？

[9:57] Max

Um, and so I think that's why I care that people code, not because of the utility of shipping to production, but because it forces you to really interrogate the material that you're designing with. So, it's more the prototyping use cases than we're just going to be shipping more features because because we can. It tends to be that once you awaken someone to a new material that at some point they also blur the lines and then write production code. But I think it's really important not to forget that the reason why is to to become a master of the material, not a sort of cog in the delivery mechanism for the idea.

所以我觉得这就是为什么我在乎大家写代码——不是因为「推到生产环境」的那种实用性，而是因为它逼着你去真正盘问你正在用来做设计的那种材料。所以这更多是关于原型这个用途，而不是说「我们就是要因为能交付更多功能就交付更多功能」。往往的情况是，一旦你把某个人唤醒、让他认识到一种新材料，到了某个点上他们也会把界限模糊掉，开始写生产代码。但我觉得很重要的一点是别忘了「为什么」——这么做是为了成为这种材料的大师，而不是成为「把想法交付出去」这套机制里的一个齿轮。

[10:33] Lenny

That is really interesting. What do you find is key to people being successful in this new world? Like, you know, there's a lot of designers, a lot of PMs at Notion. What do you find is separating the ones that are thriving and will do well in this coming future versus ones that may fall behind? I suspect that this is also something that has always been the case and we would just categorize this as founder versus not and do you start a startup versus not, which is agency. I think before it was very easy to always say well I will never be able to do this because insert skill issue and I think we're realizing that even if you have the skills at your fingertips because now I don't know an AGI adjacent model helps you uh the thing that matters is agency and I don't think agency is very evenly distributed in the world and uh I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great and the folks who stick to what tell me really what does it mean to be a PM what does it mean to be a designer and like what's my job as an engineer I think that will be much harder and yeah cultivate agency I think that's the that's the thing is there an example of someone using agency some a good example at notion of someone just leaning into that and doing and maybe shipping something changing the way something was happening at notion just to give us a like, oh wow, I see what you're talking about.

这真的很有意思。你发现，在这个新世界里，让一个人成功的关键是什么？比如说，Notion 有很多设计师、很多 PM，你发现是什么把那些蓬勃发展、会在即将到来的未来里干得很好的人，和那些可能会掉队的人区分开来的？我怀疑这其实也是一件一直都成立的事情，我们以前只是把它归类成「是不是创始人」「你会不会去创业」——也就是能动性。我觉得以前你很容易就说「我永远做不来这事，因为我缺某项技能」，而现在我们正意识到，就算你随手就能调用各种技能——因为现在有个接近 AGI 的模型在帮你——真正起作用的还是能动性。我不觉得能动性在世界上分布得很均匀。我觉得那些拥有真正能动性、并且理解周遭世界是可塑的人会做得很好；而那些一直纠结于「到底告诉我，当一个 PM 究竟意味着什么、当一个设计师意味着什么、我作为工程师的工作到底是什么」的人，我觉得会难得多。所以是的，去培养能动性，我觉得这就是关键。有没有一个例子，是某个人运用能动性的——Notion 里有没有一个好例子，某个人就是全身心投入去做、也许去交付了某个东西、改变了 Notion 里某件事原本的运作方式，给我们一个那种「哇，我明白你在说什么了」的感觉？

[12:03] Max

Ninos are, this was surprising to me, especially on the design team, way above average agency compared to other places that that I've worked at.

Nino 们——这一点让我挺意外的，尤其是在设计团队里——他们的能动性比我待过的其他地方平均水平要高出一大截。

[12:13] Lenny

And Ninos, by the way, are notion employees.

顺便说一句，「Nino」指的就是 Notion 的员工。

[12:15] Max

Yes. Sorry. Once you're boil I would say one example would be someone like Brian Leven, who you should probably have on the podcast at some point.

对，抱歉。一旦你……我想举一个例子的话，会是像 Brian Lovin 这样的人，你大概应该在某个时候请他来上播客。

[12:24] Lenny

He was on uh our sister podcast, How I AI. We'll link to that episode.

他上过我们的姊妹播客《How I AI》。我们会把那期节目链接附上。

[12:27] Max

Ah, there we go. Yeah, you should cut this one short and have him on. Um, I think the way I would describe it is, and I I I tell this to myself as well, which is like, okay, do you drive notion like it's stolen, which is, you know, we're not the founders where, you know, coming in after there was already insane product market fit, but you can still contribute to the company in a way that you feel agency and you're not sort of just like it's what's your role. And so Brian obviously already blurs engineering and design, but he also is probably our number one recruiter uh in terms of hey, this is what the org needs. I'm going to go out and talk to people and find someone. And I think that is a thing that sort of just demonstrates it's it's out of the day-to-day and it demonstrates that, you know, I want to just affect change. I don't care how it happens, right?

啊，这就对了。是啊，你应该把这期缩短一点，去请他来。我想我会这么描述：我也常这么对自己说——好，你有没有像开一辆偷来的车那样去驱动 Notion？意思是，我们不是创始人，我们是在产品市场契合度已经强到爆的时候才进来的；但你仍然可以以一种让你感到有能动性的方式为公司做贡献，而不是那种只盯着「我的角色是什么」的状态。Brian 显然已经把工程和设计的界限模糊掉了，但他同时大概还是我们的头号招聘官——就是那种「嘿，组织现在需要这个，我要出去跟人聊、去找到合适的人」。我觉得这是一种很能体现能动性的事情：它跳出了日常工作之外，它表明的是「我就是想推动改变，我不在乎它是怎么发生的」，对吧？

[13:14] Max

Um Eric Lou is another one. the fact that he went from sort of writing a lot of strategy docs to he asked me at some point he's like hey look at some point in the future if you started a startup would you hire me and I said well not in the first 10 I don't need a product manager he's like oh okay I'm going to work on the skills so that you would hire me in the first five and that led to first spending more time in Figma instead of you know writing long PRDs and now it's just why do I have to do the Figma thing can can't I just build the prototype and at least show you what I think and do the thinking in there right So that those are just sort of signs of high agency of I'm going to change the role to to to how I think it should be.

嗯，Eric Liu 是另一个例子。他从原本写大量战略文档，转变到——他有一次问我，他说「嘿，假设未来某个时间点你去创业了，你会雇我吗？」我说「头 10 个人里不会，我不需要产品经理」。他就说「哦，好吧，那我去练技能，练到你愿意把我列进前 5 个人」。这促使他先是花更多时间在 Figma 里、而不是写长篇 PRD，而现在则变成了「我为什么非得做 Figma 这一步？我能不能直接把原型搭出来，至少把我的想法展示给你看，并且就在原型里做思考？」对吧。所以这些都是高能动性的某种迹象——「我要把这个角色改造成我认为它应该有的样子」。

[13:53] Lenny

Something you mentioned earlier which I love this idea of just rethinking what is what is this role of engineer and what might it what should it be if if we didn't have this kind of meme already for it. I wonder what we lose as these roles start to merge. We used to have this clear engineer, product manager, designer. And as people start to, you know, as you talk about malleable software, we'll come back to this, but like malleable roles almost, there's something we lose like clear career paths and design consistency, things like that. I think if we're not careful, we will lose specialists. And so the way I would describe this is I sometimes like to think about software in terms of physical metaphors, right? And physical metaphors somehow make it so much clearer what a prototype is versus what an engineered thing is. And if you and I were to build a hardware startup, well, we would make the first enclosures and prototypes with 3D printing. And you would see all the layer lines. It would be very very obvious to you that this is not a thing that you should just give to to to people to pay for. And then there's a long windy road all the way to the end where at some point if you're very lucky you get to manufacture that product for I don't know 100 million people. And so then the engineering is actually the how do I optimize the factory so that we have enough yield and so that we have enough precision. And that to me I think is very absent right now from most of the discourse in software which is it's all about how many tokens can we spend and how many features can we ship. I'm like okay but where's the engineering part and the engineering part is the you make sure that this thing works for 100 million people for a billion people and on the design side I think there is the yes anyone can now very quickly take a design system off the shelf build a very usable user interface get to the core of what's really important but where is the delight in craft and so I think we have to make sure that we in this sort of merging of roles don't lose the specialists on the on the edges and Yeah, I I would say that's something we could it would potentially be be be sad if we lost it.

你前面提到的一点我特别喜欢——就是重新思考工程师这个角色到底是什么、它本该是什么样子，如果我们脑子里没有那套已经固化的刻板印象的话。我在想，随着这些角色开始相互融合，我们会失去什么。我们以前有很清晰的工程师、产品经理、设计师之分。而随着大家开始——你提到了可塑软件，我们待会儿会回到这个话题——但几乎可以说是「可塑的角色」，我们会失去一些东西，比如清晰的职业路径、设计的一致性之类的。我觉得，如果我们不够小心，就会失去专才。我想这样描述：我有时喜欢用物理世界的比喻来理解软件。物理比喻不知怎么的能让「原型」和「真正被工程化的东西」之间的区别清晰得多。如果你我要做一家硬件创业公司，那我们会用 3D 打印做出最初的外壳和原型。你会看到一层一层的纹路，对你来说会非常非常明显，这不是一个你应该直接拿给别人花钱买的东西。然后从这里到终点之间还有一条很长很曲折的路，到了某个时刻，如果你非常幸运，你能把那个产品量产给——我不知道——一亿人。所以这时候，工程其实就是「我如何优化工厂，让我们有足够的良率、足够的精度」。在我看来，这一点恰恰是当下软件领域大部分讨论里非常缺失的。现在的讨论全都是「我们能花多少 token」「我们能发多少功能」。我心想，好吧，那工程的那部分呢？工程的那部分就是你要确保这个东西能为一亿人、为十亿人正常运作。而在设计这一侧，我觉得是这样：是的，现在任何人都能很快拿一套现成的设计系统，搭出一个非常可用的用户界面，触及真正重要的核心，但那种打磨出来的愉悦感在哪里？所以我觉得，我们必须确保在这种角色融合的过程中，不要丢掉那些处在边缘的专才。是的，我会说，这是一件——如果我们失去了它，会挺可惜的事。

[15:57] Lenny

I want to come back to this agency piece because I feel like people hear this word a lot on this podcast. Yes, agency. For someone that wants to build this within themselves or even just understand, do I have agency? I don't know. I think I do. I imagine everyone listening is like, yes, I am huge. I have huge agency. I'm such an agent. I can do I I'll do what needs to be done. Do you have a piece of advice for someone that wants to develop this within themselves?

我想回到「agency（自主能动性）」这个话题，因为我感觉大家在这个播客里经常听到这个词。对，agency。对于一个想在自己身上培养这种能力，或者哪怕只是想搞清楚「我到底有没有 agency」的人——我不知道，我觉得我有。我猜每个在听的人都会觉得：对，我能动性巨大，我超级有主观能动性，需要做的事我都能做、我都会去做。你对于一个想在自己身上培养这种能力的人，有没有什么建议？

[16:23] Max

Partially the reason why I'm in software is the thing that I care most about is the Steve Jobs quote. One day you wake up and you realize the world is made up by people no smarter than you. And there are basically people who realize this by themselves or they have an amazing teacher early on in their life that encourages this. And the the biggest throughine I've found is making. I think if you tinker and if you make things, then you are now on this treadmill of just um creating and then you're like, "Oh, it's actually not that hard to learn how to make that chair in my office or let me tweak it a little bit or maybe I don't know. It's like a home-cooked meal is a form of tinkering, ironically, right?" Uh and I think the more you can do that in life, I think actually sort of making things is the innately human like sort of tool making, creating art and so on. So just do that versus I think when a lot of people hear agency, they think of themselves as they're in this big machine and they're like, "Oh, okay. I'm going to circumvent my terrible boss or manager or whatever so that I get X, Y, and Z." It's like, no, no, just start by making things. And usually when you get better at making things, at some point people pay attention and it just really awakens you to the idea that you can just change things. I love this. Uh there's this meme on Twitter, you could just do things. Uh like there's all I I love this version of it. You could just change things. Um which is a is a good segue to something you've been a big I don't know advocate of and uh proponent of this idea of malleable software.

我之所以进入软件行业，部分原因是我最在乎的那句话——那句 Steve Jobs 的名言：有一天你醒来，意识到这个世界是由一群并不比你聪明的人构成的。基本上有些人是自己意识到这一点的，或者他们在人生早期遇到了一位了不起的老师，鼓励他们去这样想。而我发现的最大那条主线，就是「做东西」。我觉得如果你去捣鼓、去动手做东西，那你现在就上了这台跑步机——不停地创造——然后你会发现「哦，其实学会做我办公室里那把椅子也没那么难」，或者「让我稍微改一改它」，又或者……我不知道，讽刺的是，一顿在家做的饭其实也是一种捣鼓，对吧。我觉得在生活中你越能这样做越好，实际上「做东西」这件事是人类天生的本能——制造工具、创造艺术等等。所以就去做这件事吧。而我觉得，很多人听到 agency 这个词的时候，会把自己想象成身处一台大机器里，他们会想「哦，好吧，我要绕过我那个糟糕的老板或经理或者随便谁，好让我拿到 X、Y、Z」。不不不，先从做东西开始。通常当你做东西做得越来越好的时候，到某个点别人就会开始注意到，这真的会唤醒你心里那个念头：你是可以改变事物的。我太喜欢这个了。Twitter 上有一个 meme，「你大可以直接去做事（you could just do things）」。我特别喜欢它的这个版本：你大可以直接去改变事物。这正好顺势引到一个你一直——我不知道——很拥护、很提倡的概念，就是「可塑软件（malleable software）」。

[17:58] Lenny

Something you mentioned earlier. It feels like something that wasn't actually possible and now is like, okay, I could see exactly what you're talking about now. Like you've been on on this from before the AI revolution. Talk about just this idea. Malleable software, why you think it's so important, what you think people need to be thinking about here.

这也是你前面提到过的。它感觉像是一件以前其实做不到、而现在可以做到的事——好，我现在能完全看明白你在说什么了。你从 AI 革命之前就一直在做这件事。聊聊这个想法吧——可塑软件，为什么你觉得它如此重要，你觉得大家在这件事上需要思考些什么。

[18:16] Max

Malleable software is the idea that software works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it. Maybe that's how I'd frame it. And in particular, like I don't want to use software that is specifically just designed by the ivory tower in Certino. And I say this as a huge Apple fanboy, but imagine you lived in an environment where you do not get to rearrange your living room and the kitchen has to be exactly set up the way that someone else decided. We would not take that, right? But that is kind of the world that we have in software right now where we have this world of apps and apps are like this very every layer is glued together of like the user interface, the data ownership and so on. It's like this little square on your phone and the moment you're like okay this is a really great app but I just want to change a little bit that is usually not possible right the behavior. uh you have the flip side which is you could run your own Linux distribution and go that way and I think then what happens is you realize oh okay I like the malleability but I also have other things to do and I don't always want to start from scratch and and figure out why the the trackpad doesn't work and so to me it just comes back down to do you have ownership over your computing life and I think increasingly we don't now you brought this up presumably because I think you may have sort of not thought about malleable software too much before I but now you're like making your own tools maybe for podcast recording for prepping for shows or or I don't know whatever um there's a myriad examples and people are awakening to this idea of like oh I can just make tools and that is a form of malleable software but it has to be built on top of a platform or an operating system that encourages this because otherwise we're just doing individual like everybody has their own individual little tool and um I don't know I I like working with people and I like communal tools and I don't know this is a thing that the folks at Incan Switch are are obviously as sort of at the forefront I get to work with Jeffrey Lit every single day now that uh spend a lot of time thinking about how would we make software more malleable so that we feel more ownership over it without going back a long time and not having real-time collaboration and sort of the security aspects and so on. I really love and I just want to make sure we highlight this idea you're sharing. It's something that I learned also from Brian Chesky at Airbnb. This idea that just you can change things that the things around you are just made by other people that may not actually be smarter than you. And it's just this really empowering thing to always think about that things can change. This isn't the way things have to be forever. people humans made this thing like humans made this uh this phone and and you could and there there are better approaches that other humans that you can that you can come up with other people will come up with. What I think about as I think about this is there's a video that you uh pinned to your Twitter profile that will link to which I think is DA Roms.

可塑软件这个概念是说：软件运作时，更贴近使用它的人的利益，而不是制造它的那家公司的利益。也许我会这么来表述它。具体来说，我不想用那种专门由 Cupertino 那座象牙塔设计出来的软件。我说这话的时候，自己其实是个超级 Apple 粉，但想象一下你住在一个不允许你重新摆放自己客厅、厨房必须完全按别人决定的方式布置的环境里。我们是不会接受的，对吧？但这差不多就是我们现在在软件世界里的处境——我们有一个由 app 构成的世界，而 app 就是那种每一层都被胶水黏死的东西：用户界面、数据所有权等等全黏在一起。它就是你手机上的一个小方块，而当你想「好吧，这是个很棒的 app，但我只想稍微改一点点」的时候，那通常是做不到的，那个行为改不了。反过来你也有另一面：你可以跑你自己的 Linux 发行版，走那条路。然后我觉得会发生的是，你意识到「哦，好吧，我喜欢这种可塑性，但我也还有别的事要做，我并不总是想从零开始，去搞清楚为什么触控板不工作」。所以对我来说，归根结底还是这个问题：你对自己的计算生活有没有所有权？我觉得我们越来越没有了。现在你之所以提起这个话题，我猜大概是因为你之前可能没怎么想过可塑软件，但现在你开始自己做工具了——也许是给播客录制用的，给节目准备用的，或者我不知道，随便什么——例子多到数不清，大家正在觉醒到这个想法：「哦，我可以自己做工具。」这就是可塑软件的一种形式。但它必须建立在一个鼓励这种做法的平台或操作系统之上，否则我们就只是各做各的——每个人都有自己那个孤立的小工具——而我，我不知道，我喜欢和人一起工作，我喜欢公共的工具。我不知道，这是 Ink & Switch 那帮人显然走在最前沿的领域。我现在每天都能和 Geoffrey Litt 一起工作，他花了大量时间在思考：我们要怎样让软件更可塑，让我们对它更有所有权感，同时又不至于倒退回很久以前那种没有实时协作、没有安全保障之类的状态。我真的很喜欢这个想法，我只是想确保我们把你分享的这个点突出出来。这也是我从 Airbnb 的 Brian Chesky 那里学到的东西。这个想法就是：你是可以改变事物的，你周围的这些东西不过是别的人造出来的，而那些人其实未必比你聪明。这是一件特别赋能的事——永远记着事物是可以改变的。事情并不是非得永远是这个样子。是人——是人类——造出了这个东西，比如人类造出了这部手机，你是可以的，而且确实存在更好的做法，别人会想出来，你也可以想出来。我想到这一点的时候——你的 Twitter 个人主页上置顶了一个视频，我们会附上链接，我想那是 Dieter Rams。

[21:26] Lenny

Is that who that who the person is? Okay. So, he's walking around. He's just criticizing all these designed chairs. uh talk about what that video is trying to why why you pin that to your your profile.

那个人是他吗？好。所以他在到处走动，对所有这些被设计出来的椅子评头论足。聊聊那个视频想表达什么、你为什么把它置顶在你的个人主页上。

[21:38] Max

Uh there's many reasons. One is um I think maybe the only thing that I have in common with this very accomplished person is that we're both German. And so sometimes I joke that I also aspire to disapprovingly just point at things with my walking stick and say, "This isn't good enough. This isn't good enough." Um, the reason why is because I think if you speak German, this is one of the funniest uh clips that I've ever I just die laughing every single time. I'm actually curious how you think about how it ties to malleable software because the main reason why I use that as a clip of reference is I'm very much in the camp of design should be first useful and then beautiful. And I think a lot of the pieces there are predominantly things that you put in a museum for display and if you try to sit on them you'd be like what is this nonsense?

原因有很多。一个是，我觉得我和这位非常有成就的人之间，唯一的共同点也许就是我们都是德国人。所以我有时候开玩笑说，我也立志能够一脸不以为然地用我的拐杖指着东西说：「这个不够好。这个不够好。」我之所以置顶它，是因为我觉得，如果你懂德语，这是我看过最好笑的片段之一，我每一次看都笑到不行。我其实很好奇你是怎么看它和可塑软件的关联的，因为我把它当作参考片段的主要原因是：我非常坚定地站在「设计应该首先是有用的，然后才是好看的」这一阵营。我觉得视频里那些作品，绝大多数是你放进博物馆陈列展示的东西，如果你试着坐上去，你会想「这是什么鬼东西」。

[22:33] Lenny

What I felt there is just like you see all like you would think it was Frank Giri and like all these famous designers pieces put up in a museum and I think to mo to most people be like wow this is so incredible and beautiful. Like you see somebody that has a status and a reputation and you assume this is great. And I love that he breaks that veil of like no this is so stupid. What is this? What is this bunch of cabinets tied together? Doesn't make any sense.

我在那个视频里感受到的是，你看到的全都是——你会以为那是 Frank Gehry 之类所有这些著名设计师的作品，摆在博物馆里，我想对大多数人来说会觉得「哇，这太不可思议、太美了」。你看到一个有地位、有名望的人，你就会假定这东西很棒。我特别喜欢他戳破那层面纱：「不，这太蠢了。这是什么？这是一堆绑在一起的柜子？根本说不通。」

[22:57] Max

Yeah, he said that's for that cabinet. I think he says something like it is neither orderly nor properly chaotic. Um I understand the connection. Now the timeless way of building and Stuart Bran's uh sort of how buildings learn I think idea is also that it's very likely that the best homes for you are not actually built by an architect. They are the thing that over a long time adapt to exactly how you would love to lead your life and they learn over time versus you know immediately. And so then that is obviously a very costly version of malleability right if you have to rip out a wall or whatever. But um I I think the main thing that deer Rams points out there is it should be a thing that's useful. And a good way to figure out how something is useful is if you can change it and tweak it. Makes sense.

是的，他说那个是针对那个柜子的。我想他说了类似这样的话：它既不整齐有序，也不算得体地混乱。我明白这种关联。Christopher Alexander 的《建筑的永恒之道》，还有 Stewart Brand 的《建筑物如何学习》——我想那个想法也是说，最适合你的房子很可能其实不是建筑师建造的。它是那种在很长一段时间里，逐渐适应你究竟想怎样过日子的东西，它会随时间学习，而不是立刻成型。所以这显然是一种代价很高的可塑性，对吧——如果你得拆掉一面墙之类的。但我觉得 Dieter Rams 在那里指出的最主要一点是：它应该是一个有用的东西。而判断一个东西是否有用的一个好办法，就是看你能不能改它、调它。说得通。

[23:53] Lenny

It all connects. It all connects.

全都串起来了。全都串起来了。

[23:55] Lenny

I get it now.

我现在懂了。

[23:56] Lenny

There we go. I won't link to it. It's really funny to watch. I wish I wish I understood the German. I want to come back to this idea of uh malleable software from a perspective of SAS and the SAS apocalypse. There's all this talk about we will not need SAS tools any longer. We will build all our own tools. We don't need Salesforce. You know, I imagine some people are like, we don't need notion. I'm going to build my own notion. You have a hot take there. Talk about what you think is going to happen. If you just think about what SAS, the problem is the moment you have an an acronym, it it means a lot of very specific things. And if you're going to say, hey, is this type of SAS that we've built in the 2010s just as relevant as it was in the 2010s? The answer would be it would be silly to say, no, nothing's going to change. It'll be the same because I think you can sort of say a lot of SAS in the 2010s was a very very fancy form around a spreadsheet or something more generic. And the thing it did is it just guided people in the right direction to fill out that form as in it is less malleable than a spreadsheet. And that sort of is the value. The as a service part is I think the thing that actually matters which is I don't think most people actually want to maintain the full stack of software. And so whenever I see someone and I am I am someone here uh say oh I just rebuilt this piece of software. I've tried rebuilding notion in a weekend for myself uh just to you know push at the edges of frustration uh frustrating things. I don't think people want that. I think for the most part it's nice if you can just People don't want to go hunting either. They just want to go to Costco and have the the the the steak in in a styrofoam packaging and pretend that the that it wasn't uh hunting or or you know an animal in the first place. I think with software it's like it's a it's like a um Brett Taylor says this too. Software is like a garden. you need to tend to it and the the the thing you pay for in the as a service is the maintenance and a bunch of specialists thinking really hard about a problem and so I don't think that's going away. What I would probably say is that tools will become more general. I mean I'm obviously biased. I work at Notion. I'd like notion and I consider notion to be fairly malleable. Not enough. I'm I think it should become more malleable.

这就对了。我就不附那个链接了。它看着真的很好笑。我真希望——我真希望我能听懂那个德语。我想从 SaaS 以及「SaaS 末日」的角度回到可塑软件这个话题。现在有各种说法说我们将不再需要 SaaS 工具了，我们会自己做所有工具，我们不需要 Salesforce，我猜有些人会想，我们不需要 Notion，我要自己做一个我自己的 Notion。你在这件事上有个犀利的观点。聊聊你觉得会发生什么。如果你单纯去想 SaaS 是什么——问题在于，一旦你有了一个缩写词，它就会指代一大堆非常具体的东西。如果你要问「嘿，我们在 2010 年代造出来的这类 SaaS，是不是和它在 2010 年代时一样有意义」，那答案会是：要说「不，什么都不会变，会和以前一样」就太傻了。因为我觉得你可以这么说：2010 年代很多 SaaS 本质上是围绕一个电子表格、或者某个更通用的东西包装出来的非常花哨的形式。它做的事情就是把人引导到正确的方向去填那张表——也就是说，它比电子表格的可塑性更低。而这恰恰就是它的价值所在。「作为服务（as a service）」那部分，我觉得才是真正重要的：我不认为大多数人真的想去维护整个软件技术栈。所以每当我看到有人——我自己也是这样的人——说「哦，我刚把这个软件重新做了一遍」……我自己就试过用一个周末给自己重做一个 Notion，就为了去触碰那些让人沮丧的边界。我不觉得人们想要那个。我觉得在大多数情况下，如果你能直接……人们也不想去打猎，他们只想去 Costco，拿到那块用泡沫塑料包装好的牛排，假装它一开始不是打猎得来的、不是一只动物。我觉得软件就像是——Bret Taylor 也说过这话——软件就像一座花园，你需要去打理它，而你在「作为服务」里付钱买的，就是这份维护，以及一群专才在拼命琢磨一个问题。所以我不觉得这会消失。我大概会说的是，工具会变得更通用。我显然是有偏向的，我在 Notion 工作，我喜欢 Notion，我也认为 Notion 算是相当可塑的。还不够。我觉得它应该变得更可塑。

[26:06] Max

We we internally joked Joanna Stern um a journalist recently tweeted something along the lines of oh thanks to notionai I finally understand and use notion. I don't know what that says about notion. And to me this is a great example of notion wasn't SAS in the traditional way. It's kind of hard to get started but because of AI now people can sort of they have a a tutor essentially and can build more things. And so my I suspect that software will go more back into the '9s of general tools, word processor, spreadsheet, FileMaker Pro, uh that kind of thing, but those will still be as a service. And then you'll still have specialized tools around security and and so on of just people who go the extra mile to really solve a user problem. So I think to some degree the SAS apocalypse is greatly exaggerated. At the same time, are things going to stay the same? Of course not. Like why would they?

我们内部开玩笑说——记者 Joanna Stern 最近发了条 Twitter，大意是「哦，多亏了 Notion AI，我终于看懂并用上 Notion 了」。我不知道这说明了 Notion 什么问题。对我来说这是个很好的例子：Notion 不是传统意义上的那种 SaaS，上手有点难，但因为有了 AI，现在人们某种程度上有了一个导师，可以搭出更多东西。所以我的——我怀疑软件会更多地回到 90 年代那种通用工具：文字处理器、电子表格、FileMaker Pro 之类的东西，但这些仍然会是「作为服务」的。然后你仍然会有围绕安全等领域的专门工具，那些是真正多走一步、彻底解决某个用户问题的人做的。所以我觉得在某种程度上，「SaaS 末日」被大大夸大了。但与此同时，事情会保持不变吗？当然不会。它们凭什么不变呢？

[27:00] Lenny

I completely agree. I think people think about just the okay I'll create something that's pretty cool and close and then they don't think about exactly as described like I have to maintain this thing forever and I have to keep adding features taking people's feedback. One of the funniest things that I see again and again uh uh I just had the head of product for cloud code on the podcast Catwoo and she talks about how Slack is basically the OS for anthropic. Everything runs through Slack and you think of all companies that would just like we don't we'll just build our own what are we doing with Slack? like no they're just they're they're using Slack like crazy and I think that's just one example of like nobody wants to rebuild a tool like Slack and Workday I think is another example. I I don't know I think it's maybe even more unique in the US but one of the uh great things about the US is actually specialization. It's that I get to spend dollars on something like notion because it's not that expensive compared to me building it and then uh why would I waste my time? I I want to do other things with my life, right? So I don't know that's not going to go away.

我完全同意。我觉得人们想的只是——「好，我会做一个挺酷、挺接近的东西」，然后他们就不会去想——正如你描述的那样——「我得永远维护这个东西，我得不停加功能、收集别人的反馈」。我一次又一次看到的最好笑的事情之一——我刚在播客里请了 Claude Code 的产品负责人 Cat Wu，她聊到 Slack 基本上就是 Anthropic 的操作系统，一切都跑在 Slack 上。你想想，所有公司里，最有可能说「我们不要 Slack，我们用 Slack 干嘛，我们自己做一个」的就是他们了——结果不，他们就是疯狂地在用 Slack。我觉得这就是一个例子，说明没有人想去重新做一个像 Slack 这样的工具。Workday 我觉得是另一个例子。我不知道，我觉得这一点在美国也许尤其独特，但美国的一大优点其实就是专业化分工。就是我可以花钱去买像 Notion 这样的东西，因为相比我自己做它，它并不那么贵，那我为什么要浪费我的时间？我想用我的人生去做别的事，对吧。所以我不觉得这会消失。

[27:59] Max

Yeah. Uh I agree like people anthropic there their time is better spent building AGI than trying to build better Slack.

对。我同意，比如 Anthropic 的人，他们的时间花在构建 AGI 上，比花在做一个更好的 Slack 上更值得。

[28:06] Lenny

I also love the Slack example because uh I mean this is a there's this graphic of what it takes to deliver a notification in Slack the sort of decision flowchart. And that is just something that you only get to when you have real users, real scale and decades of just yep we understand the customer. I want to come back to how product building is changing and how it's different. I know you've done a lot of different jobs but like your job I don't know a couple years ago. What's most changed like what part is most not something you don't do anymore or you do a lot more of now with AI emerging as a big part of your process? I think the first 10% of every project are now free. That's how I would describe it. So there is no point for most things to for example write a I don't know I the thing is has changed. I've never really been great at this. Uh but like there's no point in writing a PRD if you can just do the janky version and and sort of you know do the uh here's the demo of like what I think we should build. So the first 10% that's so interesting just that that's such an interesting way to frame it idea there's just like the thinking through of it you can go a lot further really quickly. Uh yes and in if you look at uh a lot of the the it takes almost no effort to now build sort of the first version of a startup right or like the first Z version 0.8 and then I think the last or or maybe maybe even if you're generous and say the first 90% are now done the last 10% are still actually 90%. That's always the hardest.

我也很喜欢 Slack 这个例子，因为——我是说，有一张图，画的是在 Slack 里送达一条通知需要经过什么——那种决策流程图。而那种东西，是你只有在拥有真实用户、真实规模、以及几十年「对，我们懂客户」的积累之后，才能做到的。我想回到产品打造的方式正在如何变化、它有什么不同。我知道你做过很多不同的工作，但你的工作——我不知道——比如几年前的样子。最大的变化是什么？哪部分是你最不再做的事，或者随着 AI 成为你流程里的一大部分，你现在做得多得多的事？我觉得每个项目的头 10% 现在都是免费的了。我会这么来描述。所以对大多数事情来说，没必要去——我不知道——比如说写一份……这件事确实变了。我其实从来都不太擅长这个。但比如说，如果你可以直接做那个粗糙的版本——你懂的——「这是我觉得我们应该做的东西的 demo」，那就没必要去写一份 PRD。所以头 10%——这太有意思了，这是个特别有意思的表述方式——就是那种「想清楚」的部分，你可以很快地走得远得多。对，而且如果你看——现在几乎不费什么力气就能搭出一家创业公司的第一个版本，对吧，或者说第一个 0.8 版本。然后我觉得最后那——或者也许，如果你大方一点说头 90% 现在都搞定了——最后那 10% 实际上仍然是 90% 的工作量。那永远是最难的。

[29:42] Max

So I think uh it's cheaper to just explore a lot of paths. You can now afford to say I'm going to send off 10 agents to explore 10 different things and then see if I was right. We used to say this at at GitHub in in our product reviews a lot which is demos not memos and then we would say give me something to react to which is okay if you're going to write a PR just write the change log or the blog post that a user would have would read. Now it's much easier to give people something to react to as in yeah here's the version of the product and it's like okay what if we did it this other way oh yeah here's that version and so I think that is just amazing it it sort of builds in iter iteration uh into the product much earlier right like waterfall is sort of why why bother what do you think is the next kind of leap or shift in how we build what do you what are you seeing is like okay this is now the new thing that's emerging that is going to change how we operate

所以我觉得，去探索很多条路径现在变得更便宜了。你现在负担得起说「我要派出 10 个 agent 去探索 10 件不同的事」，然后看看我有没有想对。我们以前在 GitHub 的产品评审里经常说这句话：「要 demo，不要 memo（备忘录）。」然后我们会说「给我一个能让我有反应可作的东西」——也就是说，好吧，如果你要写一份 PR，那就直接写用户会读到的那份变更日志或者博客文章。现在，给别人一个能让他们有所反应的东西要容易得多了——就是说，「这是产品的这个版本」，然后「好，那如果我们换种做法呢」「哦对，这是那个版本」。所以我觉得这真的很棒，它某种程度上把迭代很早地内建进了产品里，对吧——瀑布式开发某种程度上就是「何必呢」。你觉得在我们打造产品的方式上，下一个跨越或转变会是什么？你看到的、那种「好，这就是现在正在冒出来、将要改变我们工作方式的新东西」是什么？

[30:38] Max

I'm very conflicted on this because On one hand, I do want to like I believe the never bet against plain text. So, a famous forum post at some point. Plain text markdown. Like it's just such a durable thing. Code is such a durable thing. I think that expressing your thoughts in code is probably a a really good thing. We can talk about why. Uh but at the same time, I'm like, are we really going to just be chatting back and forth? And so what is the future of Figma for example is like a really interesting example to me because uh on one hand I do see like sort of a drop in usage of of Figma in some designers at notion and then others are like nope these AI tools are wonderful. I it's very hard for me to predict of like is direct manipulation going away because the agent is doing the direct manipulation. Um the other thing that I'm curious about is there is this automation versus augmentation fork. If I look at the really really fast models like spark and I forget what the anthropic variant is where

我对这一点非常矛盾。因为一方面，我确实想——我相信「永远不要赌纯文本会输」。这是某个时刻一篇著名的论坛帖子里的话。纯文本、Markdown，它就是这么经久耐用的一个东西。代码也是这么经久耐用的一个东西。我觉得用代码来表达你的想法很可能是一件非常好的事，我们可以聊聊为什么。但与此同时，我心想，我们真的就要这样来来回回地聊天吗？所以比如说 Figma 的未来是什么，对我来说就是一个特别有意思的例子——因为一方面，我确实看到 Notion 里一些设计师对 Figma 的使用量有所下降，而另一些人则是「不，这些 AI 工具棒极了」。我很难预测——直接操作（direct manipulation）是不是要消失了，因为现在是 agent 在做那个直接操作。我好奇的另一件事是，存在「自动化 vs. 增强（automation versus augmentation）」这个分叉口。如果我看那些非常非常快的模型，比如 Spark，还有我忘了 Anthropic 那个对应的版本叫什么——

[31:44] Lenny

haiku

Haiku。

[31:45] Max

uh no sorry it's it's you still get a smart one. It's opus but like opus fast or something just yeah like

呃，不，抱歉，那个——你得到的仍然是一个聪明的模型。是 Opus，但像是「Opus fast」之类的，就是——对，就像——

[31:52] Max

you very quickly run up a bill of like $3,000 a day. Uh but um the speed of inference really changes things. If the inference is slow, then you're queuing up a bunch of jobs and then you're walking around the building thinking about other things and then come back and review versus if it's nearly instant. Are you still going to do this? Is this sort of multitasking the frenetic kind of thing that we currently have going on actually the thing that is sort of you know gives us flow state? Well, no. But if the inference becomes instant, do we get back to direct manipulation? Right? Do you do you instantly sort of like mold the clay that is the code? Right? Um I I I don't know. I think it depends on model capabilities, which is do people is there a saturation on intelligence or not? Uh the analogy I like to give is a retina display, which is after I can't see the pixels, I can't see the pixels. I don't need you to make them smaller. Is it not the same for a lot of cognitive tasks which is at some sort of level of intelligence I don't need more and I instead I want a different modality and faster. So I don't know those things I'm excited about. Interesting. So that last point you're making is it's like smarter models will not significantly impact how teams operate because they've gotten so good and it's other blockers now like like UX essentially.

你很快就会刷出一笔像每天 3000 美元那样的账单。但是，推理的速度真的会改变很多东西。如果推理很慢，那你就会排上一堆任务，然后你在大楼里走来走去想着别的事，然后回来再审阅；而如果它几乎是即时的呢？你还会这样做吗？我们现在这种多任务、忙忙碌碌的状态，是不是其实就是那个——你懂的——让我们进入心流状态的东西？嗯，不是。但如果推理变成即时的，我们会回到直接操作吗，对吧？你是不是会即时地去捏塑代码这团黏土，对吧？我，我不知道。我觉得这取决于模型能力，也就是说，人们——智能上有没有一个饱和点？我喜欢举的类比是视网膜显示屏：在我看不到像素之后，我就是看不到像素了，我不需要你把它们做得更小。对于很多认知任务，是不是也是同样的道理——在某种智能水平之后，我不需要更多了，相反我想要的是一种不同的模态、以及更快。所以我不知道，这些是我感到兴奋的事。有意思。所以你说的最后那一点是——更聪明的模型不会显著影响团队的运作方式，因为它们已经变得这么好了，现在卡住的是别的瓶颈，比如本质上是 UX 之类的东西。

[33:13] Max

Yeah. I think in general I'm actually very curious. uh the labs sort of operate I feel like they operate uh under the assumption that people will always want the smartest model like you want the frontier model and I think for certain domains that is probably true I think if we're going to do cancer research and so on and if we're going to spend millions of dollars on something that's likely true but that's not how we run companies either right like we don't have a PhD for everything and so I I I think for a lot of knowledge work tasks probably sometime we'll get to good And once you get to good enough, then you can optimize other things like they run locally, they're cheaper, they're faster. And I don't know why the absolute intelligence thing doesn't interest me very much. I I think society is largely not capped by intelligence. Uh I think Tyler Cowan says something similar. I don't want to put words in his mouth. Um, and so I'm much more interested in the exoskeleton versus the I have a god in a box in some data center center somewhere and we're all sort of, you know, twiddling our thumbs.

对。我觉得总体来说我其实非常好奇。那些实验室某种程度上是在一个假设下运作的——我感觉他们运作时的假设是，人们永远会想要最聪明的模型，就是你想要前沿模型。我觉得对某些领域来说这大概是对的——我觉得如果我们要做癌症研究之类的，如果我们要在某件事上花数百万美元，那很可能是对的。但我们也不是这样运营公司的，对吧——比如我们不会为每件事都配一个博士。所以我觉得对于很多知识工作类的任务，大概在某个时候我们会到达「足够好」。而一旦你到了足够好，你就可以去优化别的东西，比如它们在本地运行、它们更便宜、它们更快。我不知道为什么，那个「绝对智能」的事情我不是很感兴趣。我觉得社会在很大程度上并不是被智能卡住的。我觉得 Tyler Cowen 也说过类似的话，我不想替他下定论。所以我对「外骨骼」远比对「我在某个数据中心的某处有一个盒子里的神，而我们其他人某种程度上都在那儿无所事事地转大拇指」要感兴趣得多。

[34:17] Lenny

Mhm. I have I have a bunch of questions along these lines. So interesting. You talked about how this 1pm is the highest token spender. This is across all of Notion.

嗯。我有一堆沿着这个思路的问题。太有意思了。你聊到这位「1pm（一位产品经理）」是 token 花得最多的人。这是在整个 Notion 范围内吗？

[34:25] Max

Uh, I would assume this may not include our automatic security uh, vulnerability scanning and like bug triaging is like when

呃，我猜这可能不包括我们的自动安全漏洞扫描、以及类似 bug 分诊那种——就是当——

[34:33] Lenny

Yeah. human kicks off and jobs. Yeah. Yeah.

对。是人启动那些任务。对。对。

[34:36] Lenny

What's your policy on token spent? Is it spend as much you want here's a limit everyone? Do you keep track of

你们在 token 花费上的政策是什么？是「想花多少花多少」，还是给每个人定一个上限？你们会去追踪……

[34:41] Max

given that I don't know what the policy is? I think it is unlimited. Uh I mean you can imagine at some point there would be but uh right now I think it's just the wrong thing to optimize for. It's like when something new comes along it's worth letting people explore. I do suspect in six to 12 months from now a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RARI and I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for for a lot of folks

我都不知道政策是什么，怎么回答你？我觉得是不限量的。我是说，你可以想象到某个时间点会有限制，但现在我觉得为这个去做优化是错的。就好比有新东西出现的时候，值得让大家先去探索一番。我确实怀疑，从现在起六到十二个月后，很多公司真的会开始追问 ROI（投入产出比）的问题，我觉得对很多人来说，那会是一场让人不太舒服的对话。

[35:10] Lenny

in terms of span what are like the numbers for say Eric or broadly in terms

说到花费规模，比如 Eric 的数字大概是多少，或者宽泛地说大概是什么量级？

[35:15] Max

I am the wrong person to ask

这个问题问我可不合适。

[35:17] Lenny

okay it's just a lot

好吧，反正就是很多。

[35:18] Max

that is just the I don't I would assume they pale in comparison to the folks at open eye and anthropic just by the nature of the work they do and so on but It is definitely for an individual in the you know I don't even want to put numbers in but like thousands for sure but like maybe tens of thousands I don't know depends yeah

这个嘛，我不……我猜跟 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的人比起来肯定是小巫见大巫，毕竟人家工作性质就是那样的。但对一个个人来说，这绝对是……我甚至都不想给出具体数字，但肯定是几千美元级别的，也许是几万美元，我不知道，看情况吧。

[35:38] Lenny

I think just the fact that you're has had a product or not on top of that means that it's just let's not worry about this let's just see what we can do and then we'll we'll you know in six months as you said we'll figure out if this is ROI positive.

我觉得，光是你们在这之上有没有产品这件事，就意味着——咱们先别操心这个，先看看我们能做出什么，然后呢，就像你说的，六个月后我们再来搞清楚这到底是不是 ROI 为正的。

[35:50] Max

Yes that I have the luxury to right now not care.

对，我现在有这个奢侈，可以暂时不去管它。

[35:54] Lenny

Yeah I'm sure you know someone's looking at it. It's not going to be out of control. Correct. I think there's like this big, I don't know, milestone of when does token spend exceed someone's salary. That's something people talk about now more and more just like should that be higher than your salary, should that be lower? How does that all connect? Yeah, I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.

是啊，我相信肯定有人在盯着这事。它不会失控的。没错。我觉得有一个挺大的、怎么说呢，里程碑式的点——就是 token 花费什么时候会超过一个人的工资。这是现在大家越来越常聊的话题，就是说这个数该比你工资高，还是该比工资低？这些之间是怎么关联的？是啊，我觉得把 token 花费当成一个值得炫耀的指标，是有真实危险的，这跟有人炫耀自己一天写了多少行代码是一回事。

[36:22] Max

Yeah. And I'm like, I why do you have so many lines of code? Uh you have I don't know the largest software projects in the world have uh not that many millions of lines of code. Like why are we why are we bragging about that? I I don't actually care about how many tokens someone spends. Um

是啊。我会想，你为什么有那么多行代码？你看，我不知道，全世界最大的软件项目也没有多少百万行代码。我们为什么要拿那个来吹嘘？我其实根本不在乎一个人花了多少 token。嗯——

[36:44] Lenny

yeah,

是啊。

[36:45] Max

it's not a metric that's useful.

它不是个有用的指标。

[36:46] Lenny

Yeah, such a good point. I know Meta got got some flack for this recently where they're trying to create a leaderboard who's doing the most.

是啊，说得太对了。我知道 Meta 最近就因为这个挨了不少批评，他们想搞一个排行榜，看谁干得最多。

[36:52] Max

To be fair, I do understand why companies do that which is I am surprised by how much work it takes to get people to identify the outer loop of their work and enlist an agent and build sort of the I don't know the the term right now is like factory, right? Like the software factory for the work that they do. Uh it is surprising to me how much proddding you need to do to get people out of their the way they're used to working. And so if you're dealing with tens of thousands of people at the scale of meta, I have some sympathy for okay, a good way to do this is just start a leaderboard and encourage people to do it. They will find good things and useful things to do with that as they as they learn, right? So it's a Yeah,

公平地说，我确实能理解公司为什么这么做——我很惊讶，要让人们去识别自己工作的『外层循环』、去调用一个 agent、去搭建那种，我不知道现在叫什么，叫『工厂』吧，对吧？给自己的工作搭建一座『软件工厂』，这居然要费这么大劲。让人们跳出他们习惯的工作方式，居然需要这么多的推动和催促，这让我很意外。所以如果你面对的是 Meta 那种规模的、几万号人，我对『好吧，一个好办法就是搞个排行榜、鼓励大家去做』这种做法是有些同情和理解的。随着他们慢慢学，他们会从中找到一些好的、有用的事情去做的，对吧？所以这是一个……是啊。

[37:40] Lenny

it's such a good point. like you have to over overindex to change people's default easy behavior. I'm just going to do things. I'm just gonna write these PRDs the way I've always done it. I'm gonna run the meetings the same the same way I've done it. I think that makes a lot of sense. What have you seen actually work within notion to get people to significantly change the way they work? Depends on the role. So roles that are perhaps further away from engineering actually you don't have to convince them all that much because they're like whoa I have superpowers now. look at this amazing thing I've just built because the the capability gap of what they were able to do before versus after is so huge that it it's intoxicating. And then you have to actually almost do the opposite which is like yes but do you understand why we can't merge this PR? I think on the engineering side something that uh Simon last talks about a lot is sort of any manual intervention in code is kind of bad. you probably did something wrong in the verifiability loop and in sort of the software factory. Uh this excludes obviously reviewing code, right? Like I am still very much in camp. You should probably review more code than put more effort into reviewing code than you do. Um but at least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug. I think that's a good litmus test for uh how I don't know agentfilled you are. I want to come back to the tools that you use. You mentioned um Figma is kind of trending down within the design org, which is really interesting. Is there anything that's trending up? Anything else that's trending down in terms of tools in the tool stack of your team? So, I'm actually not positive that Figma is trending down. I think it's more that there is a there's two camps. Uh I could totally believe the Jevans paradox, which is Figma is actually going up and then of course vibe coding is going up.

这点说得太好了。就是说你必须矫枉过正，才能改变人们默认的、图省事的行为。『我就还是按老样子做事，我就还是照我一直以来的方式写这些 PRD，我就还是照老样子开会。』我觉得这很说得通。那你在 Notion 内部实际看到什么办法是真的管用、能让人们大幅改变工作方式的？这得看角色。离工程比较远的那些角色，其实你根本不太需要去说服他们，因为他们会觉得『哇，我现在有超能力了，看我刚搭出来的这个神奇玩意儿』——因为他们之前能做的和之后能做的，那个能力鸿沟太大了，大到让人沉醉。然后你反而几乎要做相反的事，就是『没错，但你明白我们为什么不能合并这个 PR 吗？』在工程这边，Simon Last 经常聊到的一点是——对代码的任何手动干预某种程度上都是不好的。你很可能是在可验证性循环里、在那个『软件工厂』里某个环节做错了什么。当然这不包括 review 代码，对吧？我仍然非常坚定地站在这一派：你大概应该 review 更多的代码，应该在 review 代码上花比现在更多的力气。但至少在『写』这一侧，每次出现一个干预、一次人类干预，它都应该让人感觉有点像是个 bug。我觉得这是个不错的试金石，能测出你到底有多『agent 化』。我想回到你用的工具上。你提到 Figma 在设计部门里有点走下坡的趋势，这特别有意思。有没有什么是在往上走的？在你团队的工具栈里，还有没有别的工具在往下走？其实我不太确定 Figma 是不是真在走下坡。我觉得更可能是存在两个阵营。我完全能相信杰文斯悖论会发生——也就是 Figma 其实在涨，然后当然 vibe coding 也在涨。

[39:34] Max

like I don't want to create in general I really really dislike the the rivalry discourse that exists in in Silicon Valley which is for anthropic to win OpenAI needs to lose and vice versa and like that kind of thing. So I I I don't want to um perpetuate that with sort of the Figma versus versus coding. I think uh the terminal is actually surprising which is it's initially kind of scary for people and you could do so much but now PMs are slowly the once they're in cloud code or codeex everything is fine right and I generally encourage them to not use the guies I I I I encourage them to use the the the twe because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads and one day they wake up and they're like oh I understand more of the substrate of what how how computers work.

我不想去制造……总的来说我真的非常非常讨厌硅谷里存在的那种『对抗叙事』，就是『为了让 Anthropic 赢，OpenAI 就得输』，反过来也一样，诸如此类的那种东西。所以我不想用 Figma 对 vibe coding 这种说法去延续那种叙事。我觉得终端（terminal）其实很出人意料——它一开始对人们来说有点吓人，你能用它做太多事了，但现在 PM 们正在慢慢地……一旦他们进到 Claude Code 或 Codex 里，一切就都没问题了，对吧。而且我一般会鼓励他们别用图形界面（GUI），我鼓励他们用终端（tweak），因为我就是知道随着时间推移他们会变得好奇，会去拉扯别的线头，然后某一天他们醒来会发现『哦，我现在更理解计算机是怎么运作的底层基质了』。

[40:21] Lenny

That is so interesting. So the designers are using the terminal.

那太有意思了。所以设计师们在用终端。

[40:24] Max

Yes. Yeah. And then um I I don't know conductor is another one. They they're basically just mostly using developer tools. It's not that different from what uh developers use.

对。是的。然后嗯，我不知道，Conductor 也是其中一个。他们基本上大多就是在用开发者工具。这跟开发者用的东西没那么大区别。

[40:34] Lenny

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[42:15] Max

Okay, this is maybe a hot take and I actually don't have enough um I I it's very likely that the labs are like haha look at this guy. Um my take it's very clear at least empirically that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate right and I don't think that's changing now. I'm not that impressed with the progress in the any other domain. it tends to be like I don't think they've gotten significantly better at writing. I still very much hate reading uh sort of AI slop writing but the thing is software we we uh Andre right like software is eating the world well if the cost of software and creating software and encoding business practices in code and like I just literally mean the old like software 1.0 no kind of code then if that cost is very much going to zero we will just have a lot more of it and so I think then in that case it's more that software engineering will go into all the other domains not necessarily that there is sort of some sort of yeah like um I don't know our folks in HR are automating a lot of things because now they don't have to bug an engineering team to write that code uh and so I think that's how it's it's going and like if you look at when the model companies say, "Oh, we've made great progress in this other non-coding domain." I was like, "You just applied coding principles to this domain, which is wonderful, but that's what it's getting better at, right?" And so I think um I I just think software is eating the world is going to accelerate.

好吧，这也许是个有争议的观点，而我其实没有足够的……很有可能那些实验室会觉得『哈哈，看这家伙』。我的观点是——至少从经验上看，非常清楚的是，模型在编程上正以某种指数级的速度变得更好，对吧，而且我不认为这一点现在会变。但我对其他任何领域的进展都不是那么印象深刻。往往是这样——我不觉得它们在写作上有显著变好，我仍然非常讨厌读那种 AI 生成的『泔水』式写作。但问题是，软件——我们，Andrej 说过，对吧，软件正在吞噬世界。那么，如果软件、创造软件、把业务实践编码进代码里的成本——我说的就是字面意义上的老式『软件 1.0』、不是那种代码——如果那个成本正在非常迅速地趋近于零，那我们就会拥有多得多的软件。所以我觉得在那种情况下，更多的是软件工程会渗透进所有其他领域，而不一定是说出现了某种、是啊、某种、我不知道——我们 HR 里的人正在把很多事情自动化，因为他们现在不用再去烦工程团队帮他们写那个代码了。所以我觉得事情就是这么走的。如果你看那些模型公司说『哦，我们在这个非编程领域取得了巨大进展』的时候，我会想『你只是把编程的原则应用到了这个领域，这很棒，但那才是它真正在变好的地方，对吧』。所以我觉得，我就是觉得『软件吞噬世界』这件事会加速。

[43:50] Lenny

That is a really interesting take. So it's basically software just the acceleration of software eating the world uh versus it's like it's going to now do a different kind of job. This makes me think about the um had a product for codec said the same thing that every agent there's all these different kinds of agents and his take is every agent that will win is going to be a coding agent that builds the thing it needs versus like it's come it has like certain number of capabilities. Open class is such a good example. It's just like I will build a skill for myself and now I know how to do this thing.

这是个非常有意思的观点。所以本质上就是软件——是『软件吞噬世界』的加速，而不是说它现在要去做一种不同的工作了。这让我想到，Codex 的负责人说过同样的话——每一个 agent，存在着各种各样不同的 agent，他的观点是，每一个会赢的 agent 都将是一个编程 agent，它会自己构建它所需要的东西，而不是说它有固定数量的某些能力。Open……Claude 就是个特别好的例子，它就是『我会给自己构建一个 skill，然后现在我就知道怎么做这件事了』。

[44:18] Max

Yes, all agents are also like if you look at all the harnesses whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies uh ours as well uh they all resemble a coding agent. I'm going to come back to the ROI piece. I think this is really interesting as you said there's just like okay we're going to spend spend spend just see what happens learn accelerate lean into all this stuff you're uh saying that in maybe 6 months something like that you think a lot of companies are going to start really looking at the cost here what do you I know you said you don't like to predict things but what do you predict is going to start happening I probably spend too much time than I should because I have literally zero impact on any of this as sort of how it plays out but you can imagine a world where the labs the delta between the labs and open weight models and so on uh widens. That is a world that I very much don't like because I I hate centralization of power. Um but in that world uh I think the labs just kind of get to decide uh what the world looks like. I think if that gap doesn't widen then you will just see a diffusion and people will get very comfortable running their own models rlinging their own models right like you see this with cursor you see this with intercom notion is uh dabbling in it as well he's dabbling right now but uh obviously at some point we might become more serious about it and then you have like it's not going it may not be the frontier but for a lot of tasks it'll be good enough and so I think in that case that is just an ROI calculation that is the is it cheaper for me to send this task to a smaller model that is cheaper to run where I remove the lab sort of profit margin kind of thing. I think that may happen but it only happens if there isn't a fast sort of like you know oh yeah the gap is now so big. The other one is that's interesting is right now I think we're actually in a one of the luckiest possible timelines which is we have at least in the US three competent labs that are all sort of duking it out at the and like who knows maybe meta now.

对，所有 agent 也都是——如果你看所有那些 harness（脚手架），不管是开源的还是模型公司出的，包括我们的，它们全都长得像一个编程 agent。我要回到 ROI 那部分。我觉得这真的很有意思——就像你说的，先是『好吧，我们就花花花，看看会发生什么，去学习、去加速、全力投入这一切』，你说也许六个月左右、差不多那个时间，你觉得很多公司会开始真正审视这里的成本。你预测——我知道你说过你不喜欢预测——但你预测会开始发生什么？我大概在这上面花的时间比我应该花的多，因为我对这一切到底怎么演变其实是零影响力。但你可以想象一个世界：实验室和开放权重模型之间的差距等等被拉大了。那是一个我非常不喜欢的世界，因为我痛恨权力的中心化。但在那个世界里，我觉得实验室基本上就有权决定这个世界长什么样。我觉得如果那个差距没有被拉大，那你就会看到一种扩散——人们会变得很自如地运行自己的模型、微调自己的模型，对吧，就像你在 Cursor 上看到的、在 Intercom 上看到的，Notion 也在涉足这个——他现在在试水，但显然在某个时间点我们可能会变得更认真对待它。然后你就会有……它不会、它可能不是前沿模型，但对很多任务来说它会够好用了。所以我觉得在那种情况下，那就只是一个 ROI 计算——把这个任务发给一个运行成本更便宜的小模型、从而去掉实验室那部分利润率，对我来说是不是更便宜。我觉得这可能会发生，但它只在没有出现那种『哦对，差距现在已经大到这种程度了』的快速分化时才会发生。另一个有意思的点是，我觉得我们现在其实处在最幸运的可能时间线之一——至少在美国，我们有三家有实力的实验室，全都在那儿激烈搏斗，而且谁知道呢，也许现在算上 Meta。

[46:19] Max

So four maybe we can make it six at some point. I think like I would love a world where we have like a dozen sort of frontier models in the US versus having to always rely on on on um uh other places in the world to do this. Uh but like that's sort of pretty good. If that choose stopped I would be somewhat worried. Um uh and then it's hard to predict right like what would happen. Uh but if that doesn't then I think it's going to look similar to the cloud wars which is some point layers commoditize. Businesses are not going to want to lock in into one single provider. uh I don't know in a past life I worked at Heroku and like Kubernetes was much more successful than than Heroku even though I think from a user experience perspective it was much worse but the delta was Heroku was saying hey we're going to uh uh replace your ops team and Kubernetes was we're going to make your ops team superheroes and also we're not going to lock you into a cloud you can choose and obviously that's what businesses want right like businesses want uh choice and so I don't know it it's really hard to predict because It depends. So, it's so as asymmetric in terms of model progress.

所以是四家，也许在某个时间点我们能让它变成六家。我会非常喜欢这样一个世界：我们在美国有差不多十几个前沿模型，而不是总得依赖世界上其他地方来做这件事。但目前这状况算是相当不错了。如果这种竞争停下来，我会有点担心。然后就很难预测了，对吧，会发生什么。但如果竞争没停，那我觉得它会跟『云大战』看起来很像——到某个点，各个层会商品化。企业不会想把自己锁定到某一个单一供应商上。我不知道，我上辈子在 Heroku 工作过，Kubernetes 比 Heroku 成功得多，尽管我觉得从用户体验角度看它差得多——但差别在于，Heroku 是在说『嘿，我们要替代掉你的运维团队』，而 Kubernetes 是『我们要把你的运维团队变成超级英雄，而且我们不会把你锁定到某一个云上，你可以自己选』。显然那才是企业想要的，对吧，企业想要选择权。所以我不知道，这真的很难预测，因为它取决于具体情况。所以这在模型进展方面是如此不对称的。

[47:29] Lenny

When you say the products that win often are the ones that make you feel like superheroes, I always think about Kathy Sierra. Do you remember that at all as the thing?

你说『会赢的产品往往是那些让你感觉自己像超级英雄的产品』时，我总会想到 Kathy Sierra。你还记得她吗，记得有这么个说法吗？

[47:36] Max

Uh, it rings a bell. Okay. This just like it's like from from the olden days at this point. Shows how old I am. She was just something that really stuck with me and I think it's informed a lot of how people think about product at least in the past is just her whole pitch was uh instead of making talking about your product and how amazing it is, it's about we will make you a superhero. Like it's like Mario getting the little flower and having superpowers now versus look at our incredible product. Uh I think it's actually a thing that uh the coding companies had to learn when they tried to move to like why do code review tools automatic code review tools not work that well? I think this is actually a subtle thing which is you push your code publicly to or publicly within your organization or your team and then a thing roasts your code and tells you how terrible of a developer you are versus if you think about what claude code and codeex does is you're coding and then you publish the work of you plus Claude and you get bragging rights of how good of a developer you are, right? And so I think the superhero stuff is is definitely true. Speaking of superhero, I wasn't planning to talk about this, but I've been hearing a lot about how much people love your agent, the notion AI agent that you all released. Just like it's just coming up a lot of just like, wow, this is actually really useful with like a lot of different people. It'd be interesting to hear what you think made it so successful. I know it was like a long time before you guys launched it.

呃，有点印象。好吧，这都……这都是老黄历了，到这会儿。说明我有多老了。她是那种真的让我一直记着的东西，我觉得她影响了很多人思考产品的方式，至少在过去是这样——她整个的主张就是，与其谈论你的产品、谈它有多了不起，不如说『我们会把你变成超级英雄』。就像马里奥吃到那朵小花、现在有了超能力，而不是『看我们多了不起的产品』。我觉得这其实是编程公司不得不学会的一件事——当他们试图转向、比如说，为什么自动代码 review 工具效果不太好？我觉得这其实是个很微妙的点：你把你的代码公开推送出去、或者在你的组织或团队内部公开推送，然后一个东西来吐槽你的代码、告诉你你是个多糟糕的开发者；而如果你想想 Claude Code 和 Codex 做的是什么——你在编程，然后你发布的是『你加上 Claude』的成果，你因此获得了『我是个多好的开发者』的炫耀资本，对吧？所以我觉得这个『超级英雄』的说法绝对是成立的。说到超级英雄——我本来没打算聊这个，但我一直听到很多人有多喜欢你们的 agent，就是你们发布的那个 Notion AI agent。就是它经常被提起，很多不同的人都说『哇，这东西真的特别有用』。听听你觉得是什么让它这么成功，会很有意思。我知道在你们发布它之前，酝酿了很长一段时间。

[49:01] Max

Just like what do you think is helping it be this useful and successful as a product out in the world? I would like it to be even better. So, I I'm like my own worst critic, I guess. Uh I've spent most of my day thinking about where it falls short, not how great it is. But I agree with you that um I'm actually surprised at how this sounds so weird. I'm surprised how good it is, if that makes sense. Um Notion has always been fairly at the forefront of AI. Like I think the first notion assistant was actually launched before Chat GPT. And so it's not that like I think both Ivan and uh Simon had the intuition of hey this is going to change a lot of things and so that's a huge sort of reason why but there every company wants to become AI native now whatever that means I it's kind of like cloud native I'm like if you have to say it then are you really do you have a chance but uh I'm surprised how fast that happened for notion and I I'll take almost no credit in this um I think what's good about it is agents need context to operate agents don't really like walls of like oh I I have to go through this narrow orifice to talk to this other data repository and um I think for the first time it is kind of obvious to people why a connected workspace is actually valuable because it's great I can have agents roam around and do that and it touches on malleable software I think I think of notion as an operating system more so and then in that case it resembles the environment that coding agents are in with Unix much more than one might maybe intuitively think. So I think those all contribute and then sometimes it's just we're just dumb enough to try hard things. Uh and so I think our enterprise search is sort of like this this thing where we do a lot of automatic permission handling and so on that others don't. Uh I don't know it's it's you have to care. I'm going to come back to my quote from the Bible. I feel like that actually is an answer to this question that it was made for such a time as this. the fact that notion basically has all the things about everything in your company is the perfect source of context for using AI and helping you work. So, it's just like just being around long enough for Wow.

就是说你觉得是什么帮助它成为了这么一个在世界上有用又成功的产品？我希望它能变得更好。所以我，我算是我自己最严厉的批评者吧。我一天里大部分时间都在想它哪里做得不够好，而不是它有多棒。但我同意你说的——我其实很惊讶，这听起来很怪——我惊讶于它有多好，如果这说得通的话。Notion 一直以来都相当处在 AI 的前沿。我觉得第一版 Notion 助手其实是在 ChatGPT 之前就推出的。所以并不是说……我觉得 Ivan 和 Simon 都有那个直觉，『嘿，这会改变很多东西』，所以那是一个巨大的原因。但现在每家公司都想变成『AI native（AI 原生）』，不管那到底是什么意思——这有点像『云原生』，我会想，如果你得把它说出来，那你是不是真的……你有机会吗？但我惊讶于这件事对 Notion 来说发生得有多快，而且我在这里面几乎不会居功。我觉得它好的地方在于：agent 需要上下文才能运作，agent 其实不喜欢那种『哦，我得穿过这个狭窄的孔道才能跟另一个数据仓库对话』。我觉得这是第一次，对人们来说『一个互联的工作空间为什么真的有价值』变得有点显而易见了——因为这太棒了，我可以让 agent 到处漫游、去做那些事。它也触及了『可塑软件』这个话题，我更倾向于把 Notion 当成一个操作系统来看，那样的话，它就比人们也许凭直觉所想的，更像编程 agent 在 Unix 里所处的那种环境。所以我觉得这些都有贡献。然后有时候就是——我们就是足够『傻』，傻到敢去尝试难的事情。所以我觉得我们的企业搜索就是这么一个东西，我们做了很多自动的权限处理之类的，别人不做的。我不知道，你就是得在乎。我要回到我引用的那句《圣经》里的话。我感觉那其实就是这个问题的答案——它『正是为了这样的时刻而生的』。Notion 基本上拥有关于你公司里一切事物的所有信息，这一事实使它成为使用 AI、帮助你工作的完美上下文来源。所以就是——只是存在得足够久，就……哇。

[51:14] Max

Okay, this is exactly what we've been meant to be.

好吧，这正是我们注定要成为的样子。

[51:17] Lenny

It's nice job. Nice job.

干得漂亮。干得漂亮。

[51:19] Max

It's the same as uh malleable software, right? Like I I love that people are waking up to malleable software now, but it's been around for a long time. It was just always slightly too hard and slightly too like why would I do this? And so I think yeah I like I'm going to use this quote from the Bible. Thank you.

这跟「可塑软件」（malleable software）是一回事，对吧？我特别高兴现在大家开始意识到可塑软件这个东西了，但其实它已经存在很久了。只不过过去它总是稍微太难了一点，又总是让人觉得「我干嘛要费这劲」。所以是啊，我打算引用一句《圣经》里的话。谢谢你。

[51:34] Lenny

There it is. It's like shorter. The original quote is for such a time as this and interpretation is this. You're like destined to do this thing. This is very Bible heavy episode. Oh man. Um going back to the way your team operates because I think this is something that a lot of people are thinking about right now. There's all this talk of productivity pace getting things out like Anthropics launching a a massive product every day. Basically, your job is at a product, help people ship consistently, regularly, often, ship great stuff. What has worked in allowing you guys to ship more quickly if you are and and stuff that you're proud of, stuff that works? I think this answer is so specific to companies like internal culture where if you I've I've been at this in this situation sort of twice in my career. one is uh when I joined GitHub which is obviously I think I don't know insane product market fit uh it just so happened that at the time that I had joined there was a little bit of a I don't know identity crisis or like oh what's our next act what do we do and like lots of debates about what to ship because it's such a tough act to follow if your first act was just incredible right and I don't know I would put notion in the same bucket and so a lot in this case it's just like reminding people that hey you can just do stuff we don't have to be that precious. I think there's this preciousness that develops over time.

就是这句。它比较短。原话是「为现今的机会」（for such a time as this），意思是说，你仿佛是注定要来做这件事的。这一期节目引用《圣经》的地方还真多。哦天哪。嗯，回到你团队的运作方式上来，因为我觉得这是现在很多人都在思考的问题。现在大家都在谈生产力、节奏、把东西做出来——比如说 Anthropic 基本上每天都在发布一个重磅产品。说到底你的工作就是负责产品，帮大家持续地、规律地、频繁地交付，交付出色的东西。在让你们团队能更快交付这件事上——如果你们确实做到了的话——什么方法是奏效的？还有哪些是你引以为傲的、确实管用的做法？我觉得这个答案非常依赖具体公司的内部文化。我在职业生涯里大概两次遇到过这种情况。一次是我加入 GitHub 的时候，GitHub 显然——我不知道——有着疯狂的产品市场契合度。只是恰好在我加入的那个时间点，公司有那么一点——我说不好——身份认同危机，或者说「我们的下一幕是什么、我们该做什么」，围绕该做什么产品有大量的争论。因为如果你的第一幕实在太惊艳了，那这一幕就太难接了，对吧？我觉得 Notion 也可以归到同一类里。所以在这种情况下，很多时候就是不断提醒大家：嘿，你完全可以放手去做，我们不必那么小心翼翼。我觉得这种「过度珍视」是随着时间慢慢滋生出来的。

[52:57] Max

It's like, oh, what do we do? And our users are going to be upset. Well, our users are going to be upset if we don't innovate more so than if we accidentally break a thing. So, it's obviously a balance. Um, but I think just reminding people that the same group of people that was able to do the first act is very likely going to be able to do the second one, but you have to try. Shots on goal is a thing that we say internally a lot, which is like great, how do you increase shots on goal? which of course if if we go back to it's easier to experiment now you're increasing the shots of goal on goal right um so I think that has worked really well just shipping feature after feature doesn't I we have been a little bit on a roll in terms of shipping new functionality maybe in the last like I don't know 6 months or so but at the end of the day feature count is the same silly metric as lines of code or tokens consumed or whatever um I would rather have fewer features that are really really good and where the combinatorics let you do everything. And so I think something that I'm still very much uh struggling with is software quality. And I will also say I don't think the labs are exempt from this. Uh like I I love their tools. It's great. like I love I live in the CLI but a regression like every two weeks of like a thing that was fixed like three weeks before and they still can't render a TUI at I don't know a frame rate that's ex reasonable and so I think yeah quality is a thing that's missing like this Appleesque machined unibody aluminum kind of engineering I I I would like us to to figure out how to get back to that as an industry. Is there something you've done to help improve that? So, there's code quality and then there's actual software quality. If you're shipping, you know, shots on goal, there's always this balance of, okay, but wait for it to be awesome. I know this is just like very hard question to answer, but just how do you what's your kind of communication to the team of here's how we're going to here's where we're going to find that balance? And this is a very frustrating thing for people, but uh I actually I can't show you because I'm using my laptop, but we have a obviously good stickers, which is let's just only make obviously good stuff.

那种感觉就是「哦，我们该怎么办呢？我们的用户会不高兴的。」可是，如果我们不去做更多创新，用户的不满会比我们偶尔不小心弄坏个东西要严重得多。所以这显然是个平衡。但我觉得就是要提醒大家：能完成第一幕的那群人，极有可能也能完成第二幕，但你得去尝试。「射门次数」（shots on goal）是我们内部经常说的一个词，意思是——很好，那你怎么增加射门次数？当然了，回到前面说的「现在做实验更容易了」，你其实就是在增加射门次数，对吧？所以我觉得这一点效果非常好。一个接一个地发布功能，其实——我们最近大概半年左右在发布新功能上确实有点势头——但说到底，功能数量和代码行数、消耗的 token 数之类的一样，是个同样愚蠢的指标。我宁愿要更少但真的非常非常好的功能，而且这些功能之间的组合能让你做成任何事。所以有件事我至今还在苦苦挣扎，那就是软件质量。我还要说一句，我不觉得那些大模型实验室能免于这个问题。我很喜欢他们的工具，很棒，我天天泡在 CLI 里。但差不多每两周就会出现一次回归（regression），就是三周前才修好的东西又坏了，而且他们至今还没法以一个——我说不好——合理的帧率把 TUI 渲染出来。所以我觉得，是啊，质量是缺失的那一环，就是那种苹果式的、机械加工出来的一体成型铝合金那种工程感。我希望我们整个行业能想办法找回那种感觉。你有没有做过什么来帮助改善这一点？所以这里有两件事：一是代码质量，二是真正的软件质量。如果你在不断交付、不断「射门」，那总会有这个平衡问题——好吧，但是要等到它足够惊艳。我知道这是个非常难回答的问题，但你对团队大致是怎么沟通的，怎么说「我们要在这里找到那个平衡点」？这件事让人很挫败，但其实——我没法给你看，因为我用的是笔记本电脑——我们有一种贴纸，上面写着「obviously good」（显然就是好），意思是：我们只做那种显然就是好的东西。

[55:05] Max

the origin, which is like, okay, wait, what does that mean? And I'm like, ah, you know it when you see it. Like, I don't think anyone argued when they saw the first iPhone that it's obviously good. I don't think anyone argued that when Chat GPT first came out that it's obviously good. And so, I think that's the bar, like just make obviously good stuff. I think the mistake that maybe a lot of companies then make is great, we're going to be in this cave in isolation until we have it sort of be obviously good. Um, one of my core values is incremental correctness, which is sort of, uh, iterate, get really, really good at iterating. And so, uh, I don't know, it's probably a union of, okay, increase shots on goal. Like, here's a great example. We get roasted from our customers all the time, which I love about we have like six automation primitives inside of notion, right? Like if you include all the agents and so on. I'm like, yep, we let like a bunch of sort of different ideas sort of grow. we look at how they work, but then you do have to do the hard work at consolidating it back into like the the naked robotic core of that idea and that's hard, right? Because you have to sort of be okay with perhaps then shipping the next thing slightly delayed as you reconcile. Um I don't know. I think we have work to do there like at notion but um at an as an industry too like somebody was joking like why does claude the desktop app have three tabs of co-work and I don't know what the first chat or whatever um why do we have six automation primitives well because someone has to sit down and reconcile them and like figure out what's actually the core simple thing that should outlive the other uh sort of evolutionary branches uh of that same idea. this idea of knowing when things are obviously good. There's a element of having taste and there's this word taste that comes up a lot now and this is like what we will need more and more because AI is building the thing now our job is taste is this great is this good I feel like you're someone that has really great taste a question people always ask how do I build taste do I have taste do you have any advice for someone that's like I want to develop my taste I first I don't know if I have great taste like I I I look at others and I look at how they exercise taste and I think that The common thing I think is iterations with feedback.

这个说法的由来是——好吧，等一下，那到底是什么意思？我会说，啊，你一看到就知道了。我不觉得有谁在看到第一代 iPhone 时会争辩说它不是「显然就是好」。我不觉得有谁在 ChatGPT 刚出来时会争辩说它不是「显然就是好」。所以我觉得这就是标准——就做那种显然就是好的东西。我觉得很多公司接下来可能会犯的错误是：很好，那我们就躲进这个山洞里与世隔绝，直到把它打磨到「显然就是好」为止。我的核心价值观之一是「增量正确性」（incremental correctness），大概就是说——迭代，把迭代这件事练到非常非常熟练。所以我说不好，它大概是这两件事的结合：一是增加射门次数。给你举个很好的例子。我们经常被客户狠狠吐槽——这一点我反而很喜欢——就是我们 Notion 内部有大概六种自动化原语（automation primitives），对吧？如果把所有 agent 之类都算上的话。我会说，没错，我们就是让一堆不同的想法各自生长。我们观察它们怎么运作，但接下来你确实得做那个艰难的工作：把它们重新整合收敛成那个「赤裸的、机械的核心」，那个想法的本质内核。这很难，对吧？因为你得接受——你在做这种调和的时候，下一个东西的发布可能就会稍微延迟一点。我说不好。我觉得我们在 Notion 这方面还有工作要做，但作为一个行业也是。有人开玩笑说，为什么 Claude 桌面应用里有三个 co-work 的标签页，还有我搞不清的第一个 chat 之类的。为什么我们会有六种自动化原语？因为得有人坐下来把它们调和好，搞清楚什么才是那个核心的、简单的、应该比同一个想法的其他演化分支活得更久的东西。这种「知道什么东西显然就是好」的能力，里面有一部分是关于品味（taste）。「品味」这个词现在被频繁提起，而这恰恰是我们会越来越需要的，因为现在 AI 在负责把东西造出来，我们的工作就是品味——这个东西出色吗？这个东西好吗？我觉得你是个品味非常好的人。大家总会问的一个问题是：我怎么培养品味？我有品味吗？对于一个说「我想培养自己的品味」的人，你有什么建议吗？首先，我不确定我有没有很好的品味。我会去观察别人，观察他们怎么运用品味。我觉得其中一个共同点是：带反馈的迭代。

[57:19] Max

So it takes a really long time to build up taste in a specific domain. Then you maybe often can extrapolate into other domains with that taste. But if I had to describe what taste actually means, it's you're able to run, this is such a nerdy way of describing it. You're able to run a virtual machine in your head where given an idea, you can predict for a certain inroup whether they're going to like it or not. Right? Um the extremes are is if you are the only person on the planet that thinks something is good, is it good? No. But maybe you also don't need to build a product for 8 billion people. I've never built consumer software. I I would probably be terrible at it. But you decide what your in-group is and then how good do you get at emulating uh how they will react to it. And to do that you just have to do reps. It's almost like training a model which is also why I'm not super you know the whole um the one thing that we have left is is taste. I'm not so sure. Like I if you think about the loop it's input idea. How do people react? That seems very uh back propagation. I don't know like it seems very much how we train models too.

所以在一个特定领域里建立起品味需要非常长的时间。然后你往往可以带着那种品味外推到其他领域去。但如果非要我描述品味究竟意味着什么——这是一种特别极客的描述方式——它是说你能在脑子里跑一台虚拟机：给定一个想法，你能预测某个特定的「圈内群体」（in-group）会不会喜欢它，对吧？两个极端是：如果你是这个星球上唯一一个觉得某样东西好的人，那它好吗？不好。但也许你也不需要为 80 亿人造一个产品。我从没做过消费级软件，我大概会做得很烂。但你要决定你的「圈内群体」是谁，然后你要把模拟他们会作何反应这件事练到多好。要做到这一点，你就得不停地练。这几乎就像在训练一个模型，这也是为什么我对「我们仅剩的东西就是品味」这整套说法不是特别认同。如果你想想这个循环——输入一个想法，看人们怎么反应——这非常像反向传播（back propagation）。我说不好，它感觉跟我们训练模型的方式也非常像。

[58:34] Lenny

So I what I love that it's basically you built taste by just doing the thing getting feedback iterating.

所以我特别喜欢这个观点：你本质上是通过不断地做、获得反馈、迭代来建立起品味的。

[58:39] Max

Look at Japan like Japanese crafts people right they've just been I don't know painting the bowl for however long uh and it just takes a while and so I think the more reps they the increase the frequency of reps that's that's what I would say. It's so funny. That's exactly how um you know agents learn and and develop how how as you said a models learn just like doing the thing seeing was this good was this correct no okay learn. So it's just yeah it's just doing the thing learning getting feedback and there's no way to uh speedrun this. This is why often people with the best taste have been doing this for a long time. The one thing I will say that I've noticed is specifically for designers, the designers that I think have at least in software design high taste are the ones that both have side projects that they build where they're responsible of the full thing in end and they're also always tinkering with some new app. Like they're the annoying person that is like, "Hey, what if we tried this in our team?" I'm like, "Really? This is the 49th time that you suggested a new tool. Do we really need this?" It's exposure to other people's ideas. I I think that is the u it's also really important to surround yourself with tasteful things so that you feel like the thing you're making is lacking, right? Like one of the things we do at Notion is uh all of our conference rooms are named after uh famous objects like the first typewriter, the Macintosh, a Porsche 911 and so on. And so inevitably when I'm sitting in one of the rooms and I pay attention to the room like nothing I'm doing amounts to this like uh I got to do better. You've built so many successful great loved products.

看看日本，比如日本的手艺人，对吧？他们就是——我说不好——画那只碗画了不知道多久。这就是需要时间。所以我觉得练的次数越多、把练习的频率提上去，这就是我想说的。说来好笑，这跟——你知道的——agent 学习和进化的方式一模一样，跟你说的模型学习的方式一模一样，就是不断地做这件事，看这次好不好、对不对，不对，好，那就学。所以就是这样，就是不断地做、学习、获得反馈，没有办法去「速通」这件事。这就是为什么品味最好的人往往都是已经干了很久的人。我注意到的一件事是——特别是对设计师来说——我觉得那些在软件设计上至少品味很高的设计师，往往同时具备两个特征：一是他们有自己的副业项目，从头到尾整件事都由他们自己负责；二是他们总在折腾某个新应用。就是那种很烦人的人，老是说「嘿，要不我们团队试试这个？」我会想「真的吗？这已经是你第 49 次推荐新工具了，我们真的需要这个吗？」这其实是在接触别人的想法。我觉得那是——而且让自己被有品味的东西包围也非常重要，这样你才会觉得自己正在做的东西还差点意思，对吧？我们在 Notion 做的一件事是：我们所有的会议室都用著名的物件命名，比如第一台打字机、Macintosh、保时捷 911 等等。所以不可避免地，当我坐在某间会议室里、留意到这个房间时，我会想——我正在做的东西完全配不上它，我得做得更好。你打造过这么多成功的、出色的、受人喜爱的产品。

[1:00:17] Lenny

What do you think matters in the end to building a successful product? If you had to just kind of boil it down.

你觉得归根结底，打造一个成功的产品最重要的是什么？如果让你把它精炼成一句话的话。

[1:00:24] Max

Yes. Here's the one trick that I'll sell a course next week.

好。这就是那个「独门诀窍」，我下周就开个课程来卖。

[1:00:27] Max

Um please I'll sign First of all, I think I would actually say that I have contributed to some really great products, not built them. Because I think uh I did not I think I did not used to believe this early on in my career, but like the longer I'm in this, the more I care about what's the team that's building the thing. I used to think that was such like a I don't know, not important thing. Uh and now I'm like, it's the only thing. Um, I don't think that there is a through line out of the things that I've contributed to where I can pinpoint it. Um, I think that you can't say that the best design always wins. I think there's many products where just design doesn't matter and like I think then as a designer you can have this identity crisis of like why am I doing this? I think you can't even say that the way it's built always like the best engineering always wins. Uh I think one of the biggest pitfalls is if you get into the loop of if I just add one more thing to the product it'll be finally great. Like if I really look at the the truly great products they all have one tiny core that is so exceptionally good. And uh that is both a combination of you stumbled upon it by luck uh and then the market agreed but I think it's the what's the tiny core? I don't know multi-touch on the phone. uh GitHub is probably the poll request, right? Like this idea that anyone can suggest something to you and and sort of you see it. Um I do think that at notion it's the blocks and like the slash commands like uh Figma. It's sort of the seamless blend between uh uh real-time collaboration and and and and not like all the great products have something tiny that is a superpower. Like that's sort of like uh uh versus oh yeah if we have this suite of things and like we add one more thing it'll finally be useful that never works

嗯拜托，我会报名的。首先，我其实想说，我是为一些非常出色的产品做出过贡献，而不是说我「打造」了它们。因为我觉得——我职业生涯早期其实并不相信这一点，但在这行待得越久，我就越在乎「造这个东西的是怎样一个团队」。我以前觉得那是个——我说不好——不重要的东西。而现在我觉得，它是唯一重要的东西。我不觉得在我参与过的那些东西里有一条贯穿始终的主线，让我能精确指出「就是它」。我觉得你不能说最好的设计总会赢。我觉得有很多产品设计根本不重要，那作为一个设计师你可能会陷入身份认同危机：我做这个到底是为了什么？我觉得你甚至不能说「它是怎么造出来的」——最好的工程——总会赢。我觉得最大的陷阱之一是，如果你陷入这样一个循环：只要我再往产品里加一个东西，它就终于会变得很棒了。如果我真的去看那些真正伟大的产品，它们都有一个极小的核心，而那个核心好得异乎寻常。这既是因为你靠运气偶然撞见了它，然后市场也认同了，但我觉得关键是——那个极小的核心是什么？我说不好，手机上的多点触控。GitHub 大概就是 pull request，对吧？就是「任何人都可以向你提出一个建议，然后你能看到它」这个想法。我确实觉得在 Notion，是块（blocks）和斜杠命令（slash commands）之类的东西。比如 Figma，是实时协作与——呃——非实时之间那种无缝的融合。就是说所有伟大的产品都有一个极小的、堪称超能力的东西。而不是「哦对，如果我们有这一整套东西，再加一个，它就终于有用了」——那个永远行不通。

[1:02:16] Lenny

and for GitHub interesting it was the PR um other examples of that at other places you worked because this is really interesting just like what's the tiny core that makes everything else work? Um at Heroku for sure I think it was the the git push Heroku master of like uh at the time it was really hard to deploy apps right like this is like nobody it's sad because people don't remember Heroku they but like I have to explain it as it's the versel it's the first versel

对 GitHub 来说很有意思，是 PR。你在工作过的其他地方有没有类似的例子？因为这真的很有意思——那个让其他一切都跑得通的极小核心是什么？在 Heroku 肯定有，我觉得是那句 git push heroku master。就是说——在当时部署应用真的很难，对吧，这种事——没人……说来有点遗憾，因为大家都不记得 Heroku 了，但我得这么解释：它就是 Vercel，它是第一个 Vercel。

[1:02:41] Lenny

did it get bought by Salesforce who

它是不是被 Salesforce 收购了？

[1:02:43] Max

yes yeah

对，是的。

[1:02:45] Lenny

okay

好的。

[1:02:46] Max

um yeah get push master was just like this very simple oneliner that went from the thing on my computer now I have a URL and that's so intoxicating that everything else sort of flows from there.

嗯，是的，git push master 就是这么一句非常简单的命令，它让东西从「在我电脑上的某个东西」变成「我现在有了一个 URL」，而那种感觉太让人上瘾了，于是其他一切都从那里自然流淌出来。

[1:02:56] Max

Uh, Dropbox is a great one, right? Like I think Dropbox is like such an interesting study where it was the little menu bar icon that was so good at syncing that you could even use it as a symbol for do I have internet or not because it was better at figuring out whether you had an internet connection than your Mac itself. And it was it just that's the job. Get out of the way and just all my files are always there. And then for years they tried to increase the surface area and I kept thinking no no no no push it back. I don't want more like this is the only job I want from you. Right. And so I think the tiny core like is is is the thing that makes great products.

呃，Dropbox 是个很棒的例子，对吧？我觉得 Dropbox 是个特别有意思的研究案例——它就是菜单栏里那个小图标，它同步做得太好了，好到你甚至可以拿它当「我有没有联网」的指示符，因为它判断你有没有网络连接比你的 Mac 本身还准。它的工作就是这个：别挡路，让我所有的文件永远都在那儿。然后接下来很多年里他们一直试图扩大它的覆盖面，而我一直在想：不不不不，把它推回去。我不想要更多东西，这是我对你唯一的要求。所以我觉得那个极小的核心，才是成就伟大产品的东西。

[1:03:34] Lenny

And Snapchat obviously just like the disappearing photo concept is so interesting. I hear I heard you've also talk about just like being first doesn't matter that much either.

还有 Snapchat，显然就是「照片会消失」这个概念，太有意思了。我还听你说过——「做第一个」其实也没那么重要。

[1:03:44] Max

You have to be right. Not first. Uh I don't know. Like I think um uh I mean there are probably there are elements of like if you talk about network effects and like perhaps now with like training models it does make sense if you have sort of a a a head start but I think it's overrated. Um I don't know like my favorite example is like Bluetooth headphones were kind of crappy and then you have the AirPods and like oh they connect and so on and they weren't the first like I don't know they weren't the first MP3 player they weren't the f like you just got to do it right. Uh, I don't think being first is all that that useful. I think we're currently because it's so hard to keep people's attention. We try to like we're like, "Oh, how do I become how how do I go viral, right? How do I do the Clo thing?" And I'm like, "Yep, I don't durability matters, right?" Like, uh, think of how would you build IKEA like a generational company that is not concerning itself with whatever is trending on Twitter today. I think speaking of models, a good example is Anthropic, which was way behind, started after OpenAI, got less funding, and now is just killing it and dominating. And

你得做对，而不是做第一个。呃我说不好。我觉得——我是说，可能确实有一些因素，比如如果你谈到网络效应，还有也许现在加上训练模型，如果你有那么一点先发优势，那确实是有道理的。但我觉得这一点被高估了。我说不好，我最喜欢的例子是：蓝牙耳机以前其实挺烂的，然后出现了 AirPods，哦它能连上之类的，而它们并不是第一个——我说不好，它们不是第一个 MP3 播放器，它们也不是第一个……你就是得把它做对。我不觉得做第一个有那么有用。我觉得我们现在——因为留住人们的注意力太难了——我们总是想着「哦，我怎么才能火、怎么才能上热门，对吧？我怎么才能搞那个出圈的事？」而我会说，没错，我——持久性才重要，对吧？想想你会怎么去打造宜家（IKEA）那样一家世代相传的公司，它根本不去操心今天 Twitter 上在流行什么。说到模型，一个很好的例子是 Anthropic，它当初远远落后，比 OpenAI 起步晚，拿到的融资也更少，而现在就是一骑绝尘、占据主导。还有——

[1:04:48] Max

the thing that I find the most impressive about uh I don't know who to give credit, but like obviously you give the CEO a bunch of credit, but like Dario is that he wasn't Oh, he wasn't just lucky once at OpenAI. He did the same thing twice and it was successful twice. And like I think that's like that's actually really cool. I know you're also a believer in jobs to be done as a way of thinking about product which is kind of this it's been a long time controversial topic on this podcast mostly because of Shiram who's very anti- jobs to be done. Uh what's your kind of framing of how you find this framework useful in thinking about product?

我觉得最让我印象深刻的——我不知道该把功劳归给谁，但显然你会把一大堆功劳归给 CEO——但 Dario 这个人，他不是在 OpenAI 只走运过一次。他把同样的事做了两次，而且两次都成功了。我觉得这真的非常酷。我知道你也是「待办任务理论」（jobs to be done）的信徒，把它当作思考产品的一种方式。这在这个播客里一直是个有争议的话题，主要是因为 Shreyas，他非常反对 jobs to be done。你大致是怎么看待这个框架、觉得它在思考产品时哪里有用的？

[1:05:22] Max

I bet that if I read reread all of the Clayton Christensen stuff I would also not identify super strongly with it. I use it mostly as have you thought holistically about what the user wants to hire your product for and are you honest about what the user wants versus what you want the user to want. And then the other thing that I find happens very frequently in larger organizations is that people sort of turn off the brain when they're reviewing their own products uh from a I'm a user. Is this a good experience? And they're more like I'm a employee of this company and I made a thing. And so I think jobs to be done might encourage people to zoom out and sort of not get lost in the the sauce of like making the thing. That's why I like the framework. It's a good reminder of like no no no the user hires you for a thing. Be that user for a second. Would you even buy the thing that you just made? And the answer often is like oh uh I hadn't thought about that. Right? Like and so that's that's how I use Is there an example of this from some of the products you worked on just to make this real for people other than like milkshake example? Obviously,

我敢打赌，如果我把 Clayton Christensen 的所有东西重新读一遍，我大概也不会对它产生特别强烈的认同感。我用它，主要是用来问：你有没有从整体上想过用户到底想「雇用」你的产品来完成什么任务？你对「用户想要什么」和「你希望用户想要什么」这两件事是否诚实？然后另一件我觉得在大型组织里非常频繁发生的事是：人们在评审自己的产品时会有点「关掉大脑」——本该从「我是一个用户，这个体验好吗」的角度去看，结果他们更像是「我是这家公司的员工，我做了一个东西」。所以我觉得 jobs to be done 可能会促使人们拉远视角，不至于陷在「做这个东西」的那种沉醉里。这就是我喜欢这个框架的原因。它是个很好的提醒：不不不，用户雇用你是为了完成某个任务。你做那个用户做一会儿。你自己会买你刚做出来的这个东西吗？而答案往往是——哦，呃，这我倒还没想过。对吧？所以我就是这么用它的。在你做过的那些产品里，有没有一个例子能把这件事讲得更具体、让大家有实感的，除了那个奶昔的例子之外？显然——

[1:06:41] Max

there's a very recent one which is more about communication. We're launching a new feature soon and we're working on this landing page to describe the feature. And I found that when people make landing pages, first of all, their writing skills just like deteriorate immediately because they want to sound clever and like marketing speak comes out of their mouth. And I'm like, wait, that's not how you would explain it to a friend. And then if I'm communicating this product to you, just pretend you're standing in front of a whiteboard. What's the manic thing that you're drawing on the whiteboard to to to to communicate this versus, okay, now go back to the thing you just designed, look at it. Are you telling me that those are the same thing? Are you telling me that you understand what this thing does and like that zoom out? So, I don't know. Um, yeah, I don't know. I don't want to pick on on individual uh recent things, though.

有一个非常近期的例子，它更多是关于沟通的。我们快要发布一个新功能了，我们正在做一个落地页来介绍这个功能。我发现当人们做落地页时，首先，他们的写作能力会立刻退化，因为他们想显得自己很聪明，于是满嘴都是营销腔。我会说，等一下，你不会这么向一个朋友解释它。然后我会说，如果我要把这个产品讲给你听，你就假装自己站在一块白板前面。为了讲清楚这个东西，你会在白板上画的那个最朴素直接的东西是什么？好，现在再回去看你刚设计的那个东西，看看它。你是想告诉我这两个是一回事吗？你是想告诉我你真的理解这个东西是干什么的吗？就是那种「拉远视角」。所以我说不好。嗯，是啊，我说不好。不过我不想拿某个具体的近期案例来开刀。

[1:07:29] Lenny

Okay. Uh, as we close out this conversation, there's something I want to get your you have this hot take on on universal basic income. This completely out of the blue, but I think it's interesting to hear. There's this idea that, you know, with AI emerging, we may not need to work. We'll all just get some UBI and enjoy our life. And you have this uh hot take that maybe we already have universal basic income. What's what's going on?

好的。呃，在我们结束这场对话之前，有件事我想听听你的看法——你对全民基本收入（UBI）有一个很大胆的观点。这完全是临时起意，但我觉得听听挺有意思的。有这么一种想法：随着 AI 的出现，我们可能不需要工作了，我们都能领一笔 UBI，然后享受生活。而你有这么一个大胆的观点：也许我们其实已经有全民基本收入了。这到底是怎么回事？

[1:07:51] Max

Yeah. So please extend me some grace here because I both mean it as a joke and maybe somewhat real like just depends on which altitude of human nature you look at. Um my my take is that we already have universal basic income. It's called knowledge work. Uh and I don't exclude my job from it. But if you really look about at what do we actually need to live and like to be content, it is a lot less. and we've built this hierarchy and this sort of all these jobs and all these things that are absolutely necessary. Uh and so to to me it's like yeah, we already have it. It's UBI and we'll come up with other ways in which we as humans because we're the most important species in the universe insert ourselves into the conversation around agents. Um will it look the same? I don't know. But uh yeah, I don't know. We are so inventive and we come up with new reasons of why we absolutely must be in that loop. Um, and so I think that's my my my hot take.

是的。所以请你对我宽容一点，因为我这话既是当玩笑说的，但又有几分当真——就看你从人性的哪个「海拔高度」去看它。我的观点是：我们其实已经有全民基本收入了，它叫做「知识工作」。而且我不会把我自己的工作排除在外。但如果你真的去看我们究竟需要什么才能生活、才能过得满足，那其实要少得多。而我们却建立起了这样一套等级体系，建立起了所有这些工作、所有这些「绝对必要」的东西。所以对我来说就是——是啊，我们已经有它了，它就是 UBI。而我们人类会不断想出别的方式，把自己塞进围绕 agent 的那场对话里——因为我们是宇宙中最重要的物种嘛。它会是同样的形态吗？我说不好。但是——是啊，我说不好。我们太有创造力了，我们会不断想出新的理由，论证我们为什么绝对必须留在那个循环里。所以我觉得这就是我的大胆观点。

[1:08:46] Lenny

People have always joked like we get paid so much just to sit in front of a computer and put the right sorts of words and letters into the into this thing and we get paid a lot of money to do it and now it's like oh maybe I won't be paid this much in the future because AI is going to be taken over and so your take there is just like this a pretty sweet gig we already got. Enjoy enjoy the CBI. Yes. I I think I think all things considered how lucky are we? Like I don't know. I'm sitting in an air conditioned room right now talking to you, having a good time. Uh I don't know like yeah I just to be clear not everybody has that luck but I think that's the folks that I find discussing this the most are the ones that are in the bucket of luck. Say we have AGI you don't have to work you could just do anything. What would you be spending your time doing?

大家一直在开玩笑说，我们就坐在电脑前、把正确的那些词和字母敲进这个东西里，就能拿那么多钱，我们干这个能赚一大笔钱。而现在感觉是——哦，也许将来我赚不到这么多了，因为 AI 要把这活儿接管了。所以你在这一点上的看法就是：这其实已经是个相当美差了。好好享受这份「已经到手的基本收入」吧。是的。我觉得，把所有因素都考虑进去，我们有多幸运啊？我说不好。我现在就坐在一间开着空调的房间里跟你聊天，聊得很开心。我说不好，是啊——我要说清楚，不是每个人都有这份运气，但我觉得最热衷于讨论这个话题的那群人，恰恰就是处在「幸运」这一桶里的人。假设我们实现了 AGI，你不必工作，你可以做任何事。你会把时间花在做什么上？

[1:09:31] Max

I actually ask this to almost everybody that we hire. Um I would be doing the exact same thing. Uh I would uh probably spend less time um having meetings and managing. One of the sad things about my job is that uh I have yet to replace uh 80% of it with agentic loops. Um uh I I I envy our engineers and designers who get to to do this. So um hopefully at some point I won't like I won't have a job. Uh um but yeah, I would do the same thing. I think I am someone who I don't code because of a utility. I code because it's also an intellectual challenge. So I think of it as playing chess and go. Um I'm very sad that Lee Sodel uh after losing against I think I I don't know if it's alpha go or zero but one of the two sort of like it seems like he gave up on go and I'm like who cares if some machine is better at it like uh it's the human stuff like just you know keep going at it. And so I think I would do the same thing. I would tinker. I would build stuff. Uh I would try and make the world around me more malleable. I just got an email this morning from someone who asked me about, oh, you think a lot about malleable software. Have you ever thought about what robotics might do? And it just blew my mind because I had not because it's so far from the skills that I have.

我其实几乎会问每一个我们要招的人这个问题。嗯，我会做一模一样的事情。呃，我大概会少花点时间开会和做管理。我这份工作有件让人难过的事，就是我至今还没能用 agentic 循环替换掉它的 80%。我很羡慕我们的工程师和设计师，他们能去做这件事。所以但愿在某个时间点我就——我就没工作可做了。但是，是啊，我会做一模一样的事。我觉得我是那种——我写代码不是出于实用目的，我写代码是因为它也是一种智力上的挑战。所以我把它想成是在下国际象棋和围棋。嗯，我很难过，李世石（Lee Sedol）在输给——我觉得我不确定是 AlphaGo 还是 AlphaGo Zero，反正是其中之一——之后，他好像就对围棋放弃了。我会想：管它什么机器在这上面更厉害呢，重要的是人的那部分东西，你就——你知道的——继续钻研下去就好了。所以我觉得我会做一模一样的事。我会折腾，我会造东西。我会试着让我周围的世界变得更可塑。我今天早上刚收到一封邮件，有人问我：哦，你对可塑软件想了很多，你有没有想过机器人技术能做些什么？这一下子把我的脑洞打开了，因为我还真没想过——因为那离我所拥有的技能太远了。

[1:10:50] Max

Uh, but yeah, I don't know, something like that. Just I would do the same thing.

呃，不过是的，我也说不太清，差不多就是那样吧。我也会做同样的事。

[1:10:54] Lenny

Amazing. Okay, I'm going to take us to two recurring corners of the podcast to see what we find there. Uh, the first corner is contrarian corner. Is there something that you have a you have a lot of these already. I'm curious if there's anything else. Is there something you have a contrarian opinion about? Something you believe that a lot of people don't? It's becoming so hard to have contrarian views because I think the algorithms just uh try and get contrarian views out of people sort of you know at like a insane uh with an insane force. um depending on the era uh like this may not be contrarian but I think that inclusivity isn't always all that great um um I think I I very much believe in small group theory like I think the world is run by group chats of eight people or fewer uh and so sometimes it's great to be exclusive and what I mean by that is I even think about this in terms of notion notion could have the ambition to say we are going to have 8 billion users so every single person on the planet use this notion. And I think if we did that, we would very much upset the first call it 500 million because uh the top of the class wants different things than everybody and everybody is in the top of the class at something. And so I think being okay with being exclusive sometimes is is okay. Um, I I will have to caveat this with if you are if you're McDonald's and you have exclusive hiring practices and it's the only job in a location, that is not what I'm talking about. But like going back to comfy air conditioned like job kind of thing. It's like great, just work with and for the top of the class is sometimes a winning winning thing and just build a really really good product for them which by definition means you're going to exclude others. The TBPN guys have a really good way of describing this exact concept which is you know they had like I don't know 8,000 listeners and like a conversation they got acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars just like what's going on there and the way they pitch it is you know like if we have if we have millions of people listening to this thing this we've done something wrong. This is specifically designed for like the people and power of tech to influence them to teach them what's going on. Um and it worked out it worked out great for them. So it's exactly what you're describing. Okay, I'm going to take us now to fail corner.

太棒了。好，我现在要带大家进入播客的两个固定环节，看看能聊出点什么。第一个环节是「反共识角」。有没有什么是你持有反共识观点的——其实你已经讲了不少这类观点了，我好奇还有没有别的。有没有什么是你相信、但很多人不相信的？现在想有反共识的观点变得太难了，因为我觉得算法会用一种近乎疯狂的力量，拼命把人身上的反共识观点逼出来。看时代背景吧，这个观点可能算不上反共识，但我认为「包容性」并不总是那么好的东西。我非常相信「小群体理论」——我觉得这个世界是由八个人或更少人组成的群聊在运转的。所以有时候「排他」反而是好事。我的意思是，我甚至会从 Notion 的角度去想这件事：Notion 完全可以立下雄心说我们要拥有 80 亿用户，让地球上每一个人都用 Notion。但我觉得如果我们真这么做，就会严重得罪最早的那批、姑且说 5 亿用户，因为「尖子生」想要的东西和所有人都不一样，而每个人都在某件事上是尖子生。所以我觉得，能接受「有时候就是要排他」是没问题的。我得补充一个前提：如果你是麦当劳，搞排他性的招聘做法，而且那是当地唯一的工作机会，那不是我说的情况。但回到那种舒服的、有空调的工作来说——只为尖子生、和尖子生一起做事，有时候就是一种制胜策略，给他们做一款非常非常好的产品，而这从定义上就意味着你会把别人排除在外。TBPN 那几个人有一个特别好的方式来描述这个概念：你知道吗，他们当时大概只有八千个听众，结果一场对谈下来他们被以几亿美元的价格收购了，你会想这到底是怎么回事；他们的说法是，如果有几百万人在听这个节目，那说明我们一定哪里做错了。这档节目就是专门设计给科技圈的当权者和有影响力的人，去影响他们、告诉他们正在发生什么。结果对他们来说效果非常好。所以这正是你说的那回事。好，我现在要带大家进入「失败角」。

[1:13:19] Lenny

So you people like you come on this podcast, they're like, "Okay, look at all these wonderful things he's done. He's just killing it all the time. Everything's working." In reality, I'm sure not everything has worked in your the course of your career. What's one one example where things didn't work out and what did you learn from that experience?

像你这样的人上这档播客，大家会觉得：好家伙，看看他做成的这些了不起的事，他一直在赢，什么都很顺。但现实里，我敢说在你的职业生涯中并不是所有事都成功了。有没有一个例子是事情没成，你从那段经历里学到了什么？

[1:13:35] Max

Oh my god, like this is a it's such a weird I don't think about win versus fail. I kind of feel like every day I fail a lot. Uh what are big ones that annoy me culturally? I think like sort of in running teams I think a mistake that I made is at some point because hiring at this now it's easy but at the time hiring designers that can code was was quite challenging and so then if you loosen that requirement I did not sort of predict how quickly that becomes like a slippery slope and I would rather have had fewer designers that are more polymath. Um, so I think that's one on organizational side on product. Oh my god. I mean, GitHub actions and their uh the um uh I don't know like it's very technical, but the fact that we also thought we didn't need good package management for the actions like I I don't know. I think the world would be better off if we had thought about that slightly harder. This is maybe like I I I had a started a a competitor to notion in 2014 and uh I didn't think of it as in fact it wasn't a competitor of notion because the week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration and so True Ventures was like hey sorry we have a conflict and we're like yep no worries. Um, and we spent so much time polishing the editing experience. We did markdown folding, all the stuff that you now have in Obsidian. Like we sort of did that back in 2014. And we thought that's the thing that really matters. And then Notion by comparison, the first version of the Notion editor was terrible. Like there was like no, it was all blocks.

天哪，这真是个很奇怪的——我其实不太会去想「赢」对「输」这种事。我感觉自己每天都失败一大堆。从文化层面上让我烦恼的大失败有哪些呢？在带团队这件事上，我觉得我犯过一个错误：在某个时间点，因为招人——现在容易了，但在当时，招到会写代码的设计师相当困难，于是如果你放松了这个要求，我当时没有预料到这会多快变成一个滑坡。我宁愿团队里设计师少一点，但每个都更博学多才。所以这是组织层面的一个。产品层面，天哪。我是说 GitHub Actions，还有它那个……我也说不好，这很技术性，但我们当时还觉得 Actions 不需要好的包管理，我也不知道，我觉得如果我们当时在这件事上多想一点点，这个世界会更好。还有一个，也许算是——我在 2014 年创办过一家算是 Notion 竞品的公司，呃我当时并没把它当成竞品，事实上它也确实不是 Notion 的竞品，因为就在我们要从 True Ventures 拿到投资意向书的那一周，Notion 从「建网站」转型到了「文档协作」，于是 True Ventures 说，嘿抱歉我们这边有利益冲突，我们说，行，没问题。我们当时花了太多时间去打磨编辑体验，我们做了 markdown 折叠，所有那些你现在在 Obsidian 里看到的东西，我们在 2014 年就差不多做出来了。我们以为那才是真正重要的事。而相比之下，Notion 编辑器的第一个版本糟透了，几乎没有——它全是「块（block）」。

[1:15:15] Max

You couldn't even select between two blocks. But it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is like just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too long. Huge fail.

你甚至没法在两个块之间做选中操作。但结果证明，这根本不重要。所以我觉得那就是——在一件错误的事情上勤勤恳恳地做了太久太久。巨大的失败。

[1:15:24] Lenny

That's so interesting. Just coming back to your insight of when a product works, there's just this tiny core thing that is the thing that makes it amazing and what people want to come back to no matter how bad everything else is. Uh I think that's a really interesting takeaway. We actually kept adding new feature. At some point you go down the death spiral. So we kept adding yet another feature of like okay is it good now? Is it good now? Uh, and it's just, you know, nope. The core wasn't good.

这太有意思了。回到你之前的那个洞察：当一个产品成立时，往往就有一个极小的核心点，正是那个点让它变得了不起，是无论其他一切多糟糕、人们都还想回来用的东西。我觉得这是个非常有意思的收获。我们当时其实一直在加新功能。到某个时间点你就掉进了死亡螺旋。所以我们不停地再加一个功能，想着：现在好了吗？现在好了吗？而结果就是，呃，没有。核心不行。

[1:15:48] Lenny

That's interesting. And is in your experience, you can tell pretty quickly, okay, wow, this is really taking off. We we found something really powerful here.

这很有意思。那以你的经验，你能不能很快判断出来——哦哇，这东西真的起飞了，我们在这儿找到了某个真正强大的东西？

[1:15:55] Max

I think you can tell. I think you could. Yeah, I think it's the the obviously good thing. I think you're like, yep, I this is good. And then it may be good in a way that you give it to users and every single user study that you do or whatever like just it falls flat and they don't know how to use it. I think the important thing is actually to not give up on the core idea. And so it's that's 80% but then the 20% is like relentlessly iterate until it actually clicks with with the folks that you're the that you're working for.

我觉得你能判断出来。我觉得你可以。是的，我觉得它会有一种「明显就是好」的感觉，你会想，对，这个是好的。然后它可能好是好，但当你把它给到用户、你做的每一次用户研究之类的，它就是没激起反响，用户不知道怎么用。我觉得重要的是，不要放弃那个核心想法。所以那是 80%，剩下的 20% 就是——不懈地迭代，直到它真正和你服务的那群人对上号。

[1:16:22] Lenny

Max, is there anything else that you wanted to share with folks? Anything else you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? when I talk to like young I it's so funny to say that but like when younger people in in Silicon Valley um right now I think that Silicon Valley is uncharacteristically full of people who don't actually love computers. What I mean by that is like it's like sort of like oh I want to make money and of course everybody does I like making money too. I think there is this idea of this is the last train or like what do we call like the permanent underclass kind of stuff and it it is so detrimental to thinking about how you want to spend your heartbeats in life and so I don't know except like the advice I would give is like just don't let the rush or the f frenzy sort of distract you from the things that you actually care about and are passionate in life, I think it'll find a way. And that is not to mean that you shouldn't work hard. I think you're actually way better off if you work incredibly hard by until from like 18 to 25 or whatever. Like that's the way to go. Like you should work a lot, right? And then later you can work a little less. But um so it's more about the frenetic nature like you're so so worried that if you if you don't win, if you don't like take that last train out like you're going to be screwed. And I just it doesn't seem right to me. And I think it seems like a very hollow way of leading life. So I would encourage people to to zoom out and and not think about it that way.

Max，在我们进入非常激动人心的闪电问答之前，你还有什么想跟大家分享的吗？还有什么想留给听众的话吗？当我和那些年轻的——这么说真好笑——但当我和硅谷现在那些更年轻的人聊天时，我觉得硅谷反常地充满了其实并不真心热爱计算机的人。我的意思是，那种感觉像是「哦我想赚钱」，当然每个人都想，我也喜欢赚钱。我觉得有一种想法是「这是最后一班车」，或者我们怎么说来着——「永久底层阶级」之类的说法，而这种想法对于「你想如何度过你生命里的每一次心跳」这件事是极其有害的。所以我也说不好，除了——我会给的建议就是：别让那种慌乱、那种狂热把你从你真正在意、真正热爱的事情上分心，我觉得它会自己找到出路的。这不是说你不该努力工作。我觉得如果你在大约 18 到 25 岁这段时间拼命努力工作，你其实会过得好得多。那才是该走的路。你那时候就该多干活，对吧？然后晚一点你可以少干一点。但是，所以它更多是关于那种狂躁的状态——你太太担心如果你不赢、如果你没赶上那最后一班车你就完蛋了。我就是觉得这对我来说不对。我觉得这看起来是一种非常空洞的过日子的方式。所以我会鼓励大家拉远视角，别那样去想这件事。

[1:17:59] Lenny

Read history. Read computer science history. Maybe it's easy to hear that and feel like, okay, I'll be all right. I'm just going to work on things that I'm excited about and and then like, okay, but how will I actually have a job in the future? I love the sentiment like don't be so stressed about missing out on things and being in the permanent underclass. anything there that you think is important for people to do while not being overly stressed and worried about missing that train?

读历史。读计算机科学的历史。也许有人听到这话会觉得：好吧，我会没事的，我就去做那些让我兴奋的事——然后又会想，好吧，但我以后到底要怎么才能有一份工作呢？我很喜欢这种心态：别那么焦虑会错过什么、会沦为永久底层阶级。在「不过度焦虑、不过度担心错过那班车」的同时，你觉得有没有什么是大家应该去做的、重要的事？

[1:18:24] Max

I think I don't think I don't I don't know if it's Chris Rock, but like there's a comedian that has this joke that is like it's great to follow your passion and then he has this pause and like if it pays u and so obviously there is a little bit to that. I'm not suggesting that um you don't worry about this uh at all. I think it's more that just tune down the amplitude of how much worry there is and then just sort of realizing that history repeats itself more so than it is completely novel and new. Uh and then of course yeah if you tie it to agency and if you're not so stuck in oh I need certainty of how the world is going to unfold you're probably going to be fine. And in the extreme this is the other side of things which is often if I then talk to people who are like yeah but you know everything's going to change like okay great. So, how is a move that you are going to make really going to shield you from it? And do you want to live in a society where all of this like I don't know like it just seems so insular that mindset. With that, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

我觉得，我不确定是不是 Chris Rock，但有个喜剧演员有这么一个段子，大意是「追随你的热爱是很棒的」，然后他停顿一下——「如果它能付得起钱的话」。所以显然这里面是有点道理的。我并不是建议你完全不去担心这件事。我觉得更多是——把你担心的「振幅」调低一点，然后意识到历史更多是在重复，而不是完全新颖、前所未有的。然后当然，是的，如果你把它和「能动性」联系起来，如果你不那么执着于「我需要确切知道世界会怎么展开」，你大概率会没事的。在极端情况下，这是另一面：我常常会和一些人聊，他们说「是啊但你知道一切都会变」——好啊，太好了，那么你打算做的某个动作到底要怎么把你从这种变化里护住呢？而且你愿意活在一个一切都……我也说不好，那种心态就显得太封闭、太画地为牢了。说到这儿，我们就来到了非常激动人心的闪电问答环节。我有五个问题要问你，准备好了吗？

[1:19:28] Max

Uh, sure. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

呃，好的。你最常推荐给别人的两三本书是什么？

[1:19:34] Max

It depends on the person. Uh I would say so code uh by uh Charles Pzled which is uh the secret language of hardware and software. It basically it's like do you know how computers actually work? Uh it is actually surprising to me how many professionally employed programmers don't know how computers work. Um that one the funny thing is it does not have a line of code in it until like chapter 27. Uh so exceptionally good book. Um I have a weird one uh which is tools of conviviiality by Ivan Illich. It's sort of the contrast between like you look at the history of technology and tools that let users exercise human ingenuity and autonomy versus tools that are more at industrial scale that almost um uh have become destructive to to human autonomy. Uh and then the last one that I give mostly to executives uh that I think are creating a lot of systems uh is uh seeing like a state uh which I think there is a famous stack overflow that sort of um popularized this but it's the idea of are you actually just designing a system so that you have legibility but the system the way that you've created that legibility completely neglects the reality of the system on the And so I think of it as great you you're the executive and you have these status reports and you think you know exactly how your teams work. If you actually spend time with the teams you would realize that none of that is actually true. And so I think for for like executives love creating fake legibility for themselves because we don't like noise as humans right we want the signal but there's often less signal in it than you than than one might think. So

这取决于对方是谁。我会说，《Code》，作者是 Charles Petzold，副标题是「硬件与软件的隐秘语言」。它基本上是在讲——你知道计算机到底是怎么运作的吗？让我相当吃惊的是，有那么多以编程为职业的程序员并不知道计算机是怎么运作的。那本书有意思的一点是，直到大概第 27 章它才出现一行代码。所以是本极好的书。我还有一本很怪的，是 Ivan Illich 的《Tools for Conviviality》。它讲的大致是一种对比：你看技术和工具的历史，有那种让用户施展人类创造力和自主性的工具，对比那种更工业规模的、几乎已经变得对人类自主性具有破坏性的工具。然后最后一本，我主要推荐给那些在创建大量系统的高管，是《Seeing Like a State》——我觉得有一个很有名的 Stack Overflow 帖子把这个概念给普及开了——它的核心想法是：你是不是其实只是在设计一个系统，好让你自己拥有「可读性（legibility）」，但你创造这种可读性的方式，完全忽略了系统在现实中真实的样子。我是这么理解的：很好，你是高管，你手上有这些状态报告，你以为自己完全清楚你的团队是怎么运作的；但如果你真的花时间和团队待在一起，你会发现那些报告里没一条是真实的。所以我觉得，高管特别爱给自己创造虚假的可读性，因为我们作为人类不喜欢噪声，对吧，我们想要信号——但里面往往比人们以为的信号要少得多。所以……

[1:21:24] Max

favorite recent movie or TV show that you have recently enjoyed? Uh, I have purposeful terrible taste in movies, which is I want to watch movies that I never think about again after watching them. Um, and I just want to be entertained and I mostly just want to see things that I couldn't remotely experience in in real life. So, you should not ask me for for movie recommendations. I did like uh uh Project Hail Mary uh a lot. I liked the book and I think the adaptation was was was really good. I think it also makes me super excited about any kind of future of humanity which is I sometimes joke to uh our teams internally which is like okay if we're really really good at some point in notion OS will be the thing that empowers like five to to to eight people like explore the galaxy somehow and everything will be organized for them in notion. I don't know like I like this idea of of sort of pushing into space. Uh TV show I'm late to this the Handmaid's Tale. If you replace the concept of God with AI in that TV show and then you don't actually have to squint that far to replace ice with ice in that TV show right now. It becomes a very um uh I don't know a heavy show to watch in a good way.

最近你最喜欢、最近真心享受的一部电影或电视剧是什么？呃，我对电影是刻意保持「糟糕品味」的——也就是说，我想看那种看完之后我再也不会去想的电影。我只想被娱乐，而且我基本上只想看那些我在现实生活里完全没法体验的东西。所以你不该找我要电影推荐。我确实很喜欢《Project Hail Mary》（挽救计划），我喜欢那本书，我觉得改编也做得真的很好。它也让我对人类的任何一种未来都超级兴奋——我有时会在内部跟我们团队开玩笑说，好吧，如果我们在某个时间点真的做得非常非常好，Notion OS 会成为那种赋能五到八个人去以某种方式探索银河系的东西，他们的一切都会在 Notion 里被组织好。我也说不清，我就是喜欢这种「向太空推进」的想法。电视剧的话，我看得很晚——《使女的故事》（The Handmaid's Tale）。如果你把那部剧里「上帝」的概念换成「AI」，然后你其实不用费太大劲眯着眼，就能把剧里的 ICE（移民海关执法局）换成现在现实里的 ICE，对吧。它就变成了一部很……我也说不好，一部看起来很沉重的剧，是那种好的沉重。

[1:22:40] Lenny

Wow. I had not thought about that. Uh under his eye. Was that one of the things? Yeah.

哇。我之前没想到这一点。呃，「在他的眼下（under his eye）」——这是剧里的台词之一吧？是的。

[1:22:46] Max

Under his AI.

「在他的 AI 之下（under his AI）」。

[1:22:49] Lenny

Whoa. Oh, no. Okay. I'm afraid I used to watch it. I'm more afraid to watch it now. Okay. Uh, favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love. I know you put together a list of beautiful products that that people buy. Uh, what's something recent? Well, that list that I put together was for products that I think people should buy, I think, or that I thought I actually did the taste emulation. I'm like, "Oh, I think a lot of people are going to find this useful." Uh I have weird ones now for you which is

哇哦。哦，不。好吧，我有点怕。我以前看过那部剧，我现在更怕看了。好，下一个：你最近发现的、真心喜欢的产品是什么？我知道你整理过一份漂亮产品的清单，是大家会去买的那种。最近有什么吗？嗯，我整理的那份清单，是那些我觉得人们应该买的产品，或者说我觉得——我其实是在做「品味模拟」，我会想：哦，我觉得很多人会觉得这个有用。我现在给你的是些怪东西，就是……

[1:23:19] Lenny

Yes.

好。

[1:23:20] Max

Uh okay so this is not a you can just it's a product it's great. It's Ghosty terminal emulator. Like most people use terrible terminals. Don't do that to yourself. Just use Ghosty. Huge fan of the work that uh Mitchell is doing. Uh and then there is a new one for the phone called Moshi. M O S HI. That one's not free but it looks very well done. I'm like currently exploring it. I mostly code on the phone now um because I don't have a real job. Uh there is an open source keyboard called uh I don't even know how to say it. Corny. C O R N E which is a split keyboard. It looks very weird. The reason I like that one is I'm trying to claw back as much agency in my compute life as possible. This one is very open source. If you really wanted to, you could like download all the schematics, send them off to China, and you have the PCB back and like you can just build it from scratch. Um and then this one's silly, but uh I like tools. I like physical tools. A Cevivi pocket knife, uh, which is pretty high quality, maybe more expensive than what most people would spend on a pocket knife, but I think a good pocket knife is is is a good tool to have.

呃好，所以这个不算——你就直接……它是个产品，很棒，是 Ghostty 终端模拟器。大多数人用的终端都很糟糕。别这样对自己，就用 Ghostty。我是 Mitchell 所做工作的超级粉丝。然后还有个手机上的新东西，叫 Moshi，M-O-S-H-I。那个不是免费的，但它看起来做得非常好，我目前正在探索它。我现在大部分时间都在手机上写代码，因为我没有一份正经工作嘛。还有一个开源键盘，叫——我都不知道怎么念——Corne，C-O-R-N-E，是个分体式键盘，看起来非常怪。我喜欢它的原因是，我在努力把我计算生活里尽可能多的能动性夺回来。这个东西非常开源。如果你真想的话，你可以把所有的原理图都下载下来，发到中国去，然后你就能拿回 PCB 电路板，你可以从零开始把它造出来。然后这个有点傻，但呃，我喜欢工具，我喜欢实体工具。一把 Civivi 的折叠刀，品质相当高，也许比大多数人愿意花在折叠刀上的钱要贵，但我觉得一把好的折叠刀是个值得拥有的好工具。

[1:24:26] Lenny

These are awesome. Very, very legit products. Okay, we'll link to them all. Uh, two more questions. You have favorite life motto that you find yourself coming back to in work or in life?

这些都太棒了。非常非常靠谱的产品。好，我们会把它们全都附上链接。还有两个问题。你有没有一句最喜欢的人生格言，是你在工作或生活中会反复回想的？

[1:24:35] Max

It is very hard to remind yourself of that day-to-day. Uh, but I try to. The universe is change and life is what you make it. Um, I think we love to cling to certainty. Uh, and there is no certainty, you know. Um, I could walk out of this room and could be the end of my life and like live in the moment kind of thing. Um, and life is what you make it sort of I think it's a Marcus Aurelius quote I believe. Uh, but

要在日常里时时提醒自己这句话是很难的，但我尽量去做。「宇宙即变化，生活即你之所造（The universe is change and life is what you make it）。」我觉得我们特别爱去抓住确定性，而其实根本没有确定性，你知道。我可能走出这个房间，那就可能是我生命的终点，所以就是要「活在当下」那种意思。而「生活即你之所造」——我觉得这应该是 Marcus Aurelius（马可·奥勒留）的一句话，我相信是。不过……

[1:24:59] Max

um, yeah I I And then um, do you really want to know how it's going to end? Like no spoilers just like you know enjoy the ride. Final question. You speak German. Do you have a favorite German word? Uh I do uh tuftla which is uh like tinker but it's to me it sounds like it has a less tinker can sometimes be a little bit derogatory and I think with the German equivalent it's just not uh that harsh and then the other one is uh faba which is the word for user but it puts so much more emphasize on using up a Like as in if you think about user is like you're using it but using it up like you've you've you and so then like you think a lot more about the um impermanence slash the wastefulness of products that you might build uh if you use that word.

嗯，是的，我——然后呢，你真的想知道它会怎么结束吗？别剧透嘛，就是，你知道，享受这段旅程。最后一个问题。你会说德语。你有没有最喜欢的德语词？呃，我有，「Tüftler」，意思类似「鼓捣／钻研的人（tinker）」，但对我来说它听起来——tinker 这个词有时候会带点贬义，而我觉得德语里的对应词就没那么刺耳。然后另一个是「Verbraucher」，是「用户（user）」这个词，但它把重点更多放在「用掉、耗尽」上。就好比，如果你想 user 这个词，是「你在使用它」，而 Verbraucher 是「把它用尽」——你、你……所以你就会更多地去想产品的那种「无常感／浪费感」，如果你用那个词来称呼用户的话。

[1:25:54] Lenny

I love it. I love that you had quick answers to this question. Max, this was amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to ping you about anything? And how can listeners be useful to you? I am unfortunately on X or Twitter. Um I I would like to be less addicted to that thing. Uh max.dev. Um is I don't even know if I linked to X, but I'll I'll put it on there for your listeners. How can listeners be helpful to me? Go for a walk in whatever city you're in or forest, wherever you want to go. Uh actually, no, it's it's better if it's man-made uh or humanmade. Um, and just carefully look at how everything around you is made up by people that are no smarter than you and realize that probably in the span of 6 to9 months, you can for most things around you figure out how to make it from scratch. And therefore, uh, you have much more agency than than you think. And so, just exercise that.

我太喜欢了。我喜欢你对这个问题都能给出这么快的答案。Max，这真是太棒了。非常感谢你来做这期节目。最后两个问题。如果大家想就任何事联系你，他们能在网上哪里找到你？以及听众可以怎样对你有所帮助？我很不幸还在 X，也就是 Twitter 上。我希望自己对那玩意儿别那么上瘾。max.dev，我都不知道自己有没有在上面放 X 的链接，但我会为你的听众放上去。听众可以怎么帮我？去你所在的任何城市散个步，或者去森林，去你想去的任何地方。其实，不，最好是去人造的、人为建造的地方。然后仔细看看你周围的一切，都是由那些并不比你聪明的人造出来的，并意识到：对于你周围的大多数东西，你大概在 6 到 9 个月的时间跨度里，就能搞清楚怎么从零把它做出来。因此，你拥有的能动性比你以为的要多得多。所以，就去施展它吧。

[1:26:53] Lenny

What a beautiful way to end it. Max, thank you so much for being here.

这个收尾方式真美。Max，非常感谢你来到这里。

[1:26:56] Max

Thank you for having me.

谢谢你邀请我。

[1:26:58] Lenny

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

大家好，非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评个分或留个评论，因为那真的能帮助其他听众发现这档播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 上找到所有往期节目，或了解更多关于本节目的信息。我们下期再见。