Ludicrous Speed

We're trying a new way of building products at Commons. I call it ludicrous speed.

It only works if you suspend disbelief for a while. Let go of a few old assumptions about software development and embrace the vibe.

The reason it works is that almost everything we build shares the same DNA. Forty or so applications. One framework (Nuxt). The same UI library. The same databases. The same deployment pipeline. The same monitoring. Once you've removed enough variation, an LLM stops generating code and starts completing patterns.

Git has become the coordination layer. Ideas become issues. Issues become pull requests. Pull requests become reviews. Reviews become merges. Merges deploy automatically to production. It's a bit like Pieter Levels' philosophy of living in production: ship first, fix quickly, keep moving.

My job has changed more than I expected. I spend almost no time writing code.

Instead, I collect feedback and think carefully about specifications. During meetings I'll describe bugs, annotate screenshots, sketch features, and let Claude turn everything into issues. At other times I think about functionality, scope, and (more importantly) what can be removed, simplified, or consolidated. I have LLMs challenge those ideas before turning them into issues. I'll polish them, group a few into epics if it makes sense, and mark them Ready.

From there, the system takes over.

Cloud instances pick up the work, implement it, review one another, fix what needs fixing, merge to main, and deploy. I mostly watch the conveyor belt, stepping in when the pipeline gets stuck or an agent needs a nudge. Most of the time I simply receive a WhatsApp notification telling me a feature is live.

The remarkable part isn't the automation.

It's the latency.

I can walk out of a product meeting, spend ten minutes polishing the issues, and by the time I've grabbed a coffee, people are using the changes in production. The same applies to ideas from the rest of the team. They create issues, or simply tell someone on the tech team what they want, and minutes later it's real software.

That's what ludicrous speed feels like.

There are no natural pauses anymore. The default state is shipping.

It's not for everyone. Sometimes we deliberately slow things down, add approvals, or gate releases. But for many of our internal products, we've found that continuous deployment with AI in the loop is not only viable, it's genuinely more enjoyable.

I don't know if this is where software development is heading.

I just know I've never had more fun building products.