In a way, everyone’s experience has been reset. We’re stepping into a new cycle of development – something I’ve seen before. Back then, information was scarce, people mostly learnt on their own through experimentation, and developers weren’t rigidly categorised. There were more generalists – people who understood systems through hands-on experience. And what really mattered was true expertise.
Now, with the rise of AI, it feels like history is repeating itself. Once again, there’s demand for curious people with a broad perspective – those who can quickly navigate new domains, synthesise knowledge across fields, and apply technology meaningfully, not just stack tools.
At the same time, there’s a clear shift toward small, highly effective teams.
Look at how products like Cursor or companies like Anthropic ship, there’s this sense that small teams are pushing an insane amount of features into production. And this is becoming the new bottleneck in development.
With agent-based workflows, you can now generate so much output that you only need a few people to keep the system moving forward. Add too many people, and you quickly lose the efficiency these tools give you.
And this is where things get interesting.
For this to work, you don’t need perfect processes. You need autonomy. The ability to test hypotheses quickly, ship fast, and fail – without being crushed by it.
The idea of an “error budget”
Booking once described a similar approach. The idea is simple: a business has a core metric that drives revenue. It intentionally allows a certain percentage of loss due to experimentation.
As long as teams stay within that “error budget“, they’re encouraged to move fast. If they start hurting the metric too much, quality controls tighten. But if they’re barely using the error budget, leadership steps in and asks the following:
“Why are you playing it so safe? Where are the bold experiments?”
This is a very healthy mindset.
Because movement is life for a company. The moment it locks itself into rigid processes, it starts to stagnate. Growth almost always comes from experimentation.
Honestly, the best things I’ve seen inside companies rarely came from formal processes. They were born in the gaps – outside the system.
Sometimes it feels like the real purpose of good processes isn’t to control everything but to protect space for experimentation.
You don’t have to look far for examples.
Take Claude Code at Anthropic. It essentially started as an internal experiment—a niche initiative that spread organically inside the company. Now it’s one of their flagship products.
How do you plan something like that in advance? How do you manufacture innovation?
Maybe there are ways. But the only reliable pattern we’ve seen looks like this:
constraints, a clear goal, free time, permission to fail, supportive processes and people who genuinely care.
And yet, we often do the opposite.
We over-optimise internal quality. We create “greenhouse conditions” for processes. We improve systems from the inside and end up with weak results.
It’s funny, when Claude Code’s source code leaked, people panicked, criticising how “messy” it looked. But more grounded voices pointed out the obvious:
This product generates massive value and solves real problems. Why obsess over making the code perfect, just like some teams obsess over perfect processes?
This is where Elon Musk’s idea fits perfectly:
The most common mistake is optimising something that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
And that’s precisely where we keep going wrong.
Instead of removing unnecessary things, simplifying, prototyping, and making systems lighter – we jump straight into building processes, quality gates, and automation.
But if you create overly controlled environments, you kill the culture that enables experimentation. The unconventional but passionate people leave. And one day, you realise you’ve taken a wrong turn, but by then, it’s too late to fix it.
So right now is a unique moment.
The old world hasn’t fully adapted yet. Knowledge has been reset. And AI gives massive leverage even to individuals.
Welcome to NG+.
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