Ever since I read Eric Ries and went into a decade-and-a-half sustained tantrum I’ve been thinking about how impoverished our conceptions of waste are.

I haven’t revisited this topic since AI reduced the time to code from weeks to hours.

Where even three years ago designers could appeal to a manager’s or engineer’s fears of wasting months building the wrong thing and suggest adding two weeks to the process to reduce that risk, it is much harder to suggest spending two weeks to reduce the risk of wasting two days, much less two hours.

But this was never anything more than pandering to the impoverished conception of waste. What is really at stake in this question is wasting something much more fragile, and much harder to measure.

Product releases that neglect testing with users are even more wasteful — it is just that they externalize waste to users, and, consequently waste relationship resources.

In the days before Agile and its many offshoots, UXers felt something very few designers feel anymore. We felt fiercely protective of our users. We lived in horror that we might confuse them, inconvenience them, frustrate them or otherwise alienate them with our design mistakes. For this reason, the idea of putting something out without first testing it was unthinkable.

We didn’t want to waste our user’s time, comfort, or good mood, not only because they would leave and not use whatever it was we were designing today — but because this would damage the relationship long-term. They might never want to try again. It might even damage their overall relationship with the brand.

So, yes, we wanted to learn how to improve the design, and consequently improve the experience of using the design — which was our real goal.

But we wanted to learn before we put the thing before users, because learning after the release meant that we’d already inflicted pain on the user and damaged the relationship.

But Eric Ries not only saw nothing wrong with learning from user pain, he perpetualized it by making this learning-from-pain a continuous never-ending process. He, like way too damn many engineers and product managers failed to distinguish between improving his product (as a thing) and improving his user’s experience (which is how it is to use the thing, now and over time):

I’m a cofounder and chief technology officer of this company, which is called IMVU. At this point in our careers, my cofounders and I are determined to make new mistakes. We do everything wrong: instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it. After securing initial customers, we change the product constantly — much too fast by traditional standards — shipping new versions of our product dozens of times every single day. We really did have customers in those early days — true visionary early adopters — and we often talked to them and asked for their feedback. But we emphatically did not do what they said. We viewed their input as only one source of information about our product and overall vision. In fact, we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

Traditional business thinking says that this approach shouldn’t work but it does and you don’t have to take my word for it. As you’ll see throughout this book, the approach we pioneered at IMVU has become the basis for a new movement of entrepreneurs around the world. It builds on many previous management and product development ideas, including lean manufacturing, design thinking, customer development, and agile development. It represents a new approach to creating continuous innovation. It’s called the Lean Startup.

But now, as vibe-coders careen ahead at top-speed — cutting designers out of the process and throwing whatever UI slop AI cranks out as fast as they can rub their magic genie-lamp machines — the practice of externalizing waste to customers will be the norm. We will learn to expect wasted time, effort, calm, and happiness from our dealings with organizations.

And, our relationships will devolve accordingly. Seething resentment, anxious mistrust and disgusted alienation will characterize how we feel about organizations who provide us ever lowering low-touch, low-care, low-thought products and services — designed for learning from the pain to which we are incessantly subjected.

Think about your service providers and ask yourself if this isn’t already mostly true.