Products are made of language, not code

People think digital products are made of code. But that's like saying they are made of electricity, or light.

In fact, they are made of language. And that has only become more true with LLM-coding apps like Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable.

They start with a conversation – carefully asked questions, matched with intuition to work out customer needs.

That then becomes a problem statement. Chosen as much by what you leave out as what you put in. Differentiated by clear, specific, meaningful word choices. No more than you need.

Directly from the problems you solve, you use language to logically describe the ways you will solve it. YES YOU HAVE TO WRITE THIS DOWN. Because there's nowhere to hide when you choose this word or that. Failures of logic become clear. And it gives you something to build on, where changes actually matter.

The way you use language against non-technical challenges is the same as the way programmers use code against technical challenges.

The fact is, I think this was always true. But as anyone who has used AI-coding tools will know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of fixes.

Think of it this way: you used to have to be able to both read and write two languages: code and speech.

Now, the best spot is if you can understand both, so you can tell if the code is heading in the right or wrong direction. But you don't need to be able to speak it.

At first this might sound easier than learning to code. But it's actually ruthlessly harder – perhaps because there's no compiler to tell you if it's working or not.

Altogether, I think it's a fantastic development that our products are now more limited by what we mean, than what we are able to build.