https://pnc.st/s/business-books/9720205c/the-juggling-act-wi...

He gets into many of the issues discussed in this thread: having faith while being a CEO and how to handle that.

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/UI/A...

So your opinion is based on just reading the table of contents? I always find it disconcerting when someone writes a multi-paragraph commentary on a work they didn't actually read or see.

I understand that you're commenting on the approach more than the contents, but you're pretty dismissive of it without actually reading the details of how they went about things.

You're not quite judging a book by its cover, but you're not that far beyond that.

I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analogies.

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747829

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572024

Points: 31

# Comments: 6

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.

- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).

These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.

Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3

Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun...

But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...).

In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).

I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).

And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative."

So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?

As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.

It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.