O TYM ODCINKU
What would help your customers more: another round of faster AI output, or a better way to see what you're building?
Josh Colter, the majority owner of Cardboard, has put a lot of thought into that question. He bought the company with a bet on AI and has been combining story maps with detailed instructions so he can see the big picture while the models work through the details.
His comparison comes from the Wright brothers. He says "they thought about control first." A bigger engine is useful once you can steer. Josh applies that idea to building software: make the work visible, understand the customer behavior you're trying to change, and keep releases small enough to inspect.
We talk about the difference between having AI drive and learning to operate it yourself, why a long specification can hide something a human needs to see, and how Josh planned and shipped dark mode in three days after finding years of requests from users of a competing product.
Useful questions from the conversation
Can you see the work clearly enough to tell where it's going?
Can the people building it understand the plan as readily as the AI can?
What customer request are you trying to meet, and how will you check the result?
Chapters
00:00 Control before thrust
00:45 Show intro
00:53 Meet Josh Colter
01:26 Buying Cardboard and betting on AI
02:46 Chauffeurs and airmen
08:47 Why a bigger engine needs control
11:05 Make the work visible
15:20 Story maps, specifications and human understanding
20:32 Planning and shipping dark mode
25:26 Checking what you've actually built
26:35 Where to find Josh and Cardboard
TRANSKRYPCJA 🔗
Hunter Harris: Largely
Josh Colter: from that aggressively as a solo builder. I see a lot of people that just throw more robots at a problem and that hoping that compute will eventually figure it out. And I think there's a more interesting, the Wright brothers when they launched their plane, they ultimately constructed a very light engine that effectively did the j…
