Worse is still Better

In 1989, Richard P. Gabriel was trying to make Lisp a thing, and he noticed that worst seemed to be better, because Unix won out despite taking a lot of shortcuts and just getting out to the marketplace. The essay is very good, and you should totally read the whole thing, but basically, he realized that first-to-market mattered a lot more than best-to-market. This is disputed by Peter Thiel, who believes that last-to-market wins. For example, Facebook was not the first social media platform, by any means.

When you read the Unix guys, they talk a lot about this, that 90% today is much better than 100% tomorrow. And this is still true today. I have a draft of an essay that I was working on about coding with Claude Code, about how Claude Code is actually not great for production coding, but is an excellent assistant and therefore you can code with surgeons. And then, as I was working on this and refining it and crafting it and getting it all perfect, someone else came out with the exact…