{
  "id": "5f096b9b71ce",
  "url": "https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/",
  "title": "Seeing like a software company",
  "note": "I haven't used this term of legibility but I get it and the concept makes a ton of sense. Creating large systems requires large groups of engineers to work together, that requires legibility between everyone on how that system works, and that has an extraordinary cost. \n\nI love that the article calls out when you abandon legibility. This, to me, is the key where senior leadership in a technology team needs to be comfortable. Where are you switching modes and for what purpose. You need to operate in both.\n\n> I think this view is naive. All organizations - tech companies, social clubs, governments - have both a legible and an illegible side. The legible side is important, past a certain size. It lets the organization do things that would otherwise be impossible: long-term planning, coordination with other very large organizations, and so on. But the illegible side is just as important. It allows for high-efficiency work, offers a release valve for processes that don't fit the current circumstances, and fills the natural human desire for gossip and soft consensus.\n\nInteresting stuff. \n",
  "voice": "mixed",
  "saved": "2025-12-01T23:04:33Z",
  "host": "seangoedecke.com",
  "kind": "page",
  "tags": [],
  "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/5f096b9b71ce/",
  "markdown": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/5f096b9b71ce.md",
  "issues": [
    {
      "number": 335,
      "slug": "335",
      "title": "Weekly Thing 335 / Complexity, Fizzy, Soul",
      "date": "2025-12-06T12:00:00Z",
      "section": "Notable",
      "position": 2,
      "url": "https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/335/",
      "page": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/issues/335/"
    }
  ],
  "connections": {
    "same_host": {
      "count": 1,
      "page": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/seangoedecke.com/",
      "nearest": [
        {
          "id": "3470bf756b1f",
          "title": "I'm addicted to being useful",
          "url": "https://www.seangoedecke.com/addicted-to-being-useful/",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/3470bf756b1f/"
        }
      ]
    },
    "same_week": {
      "count": 18,
      "nearest": [
        {
          "id": "6bfe04e0bd79",
          "title": "Tiger Style",
          "url": "https://tigerstyle.dev/",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/6bfe04e0bd79/"
        },
        {
          "id": "c64bc55e1cbf",
          "title": "Brief thoughts on the recent Cloudflare outage – Surfing Complexity",
          "url": "https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/26/brief-thoughts-on-the-recent-cloudflare-outage/",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/c64bc55e1cbf/"
        },
        {
          "id": "c91153d296ea",
          "title": "Effective harnesses for long-running agents Anthropic",
          "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-harnesses-for-long-running-agents",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/c91153d296ea/"
        },
        {
          "id": "ccaa6d1d09b3",
          "title": "Fizzy – Kanban as it should be. Not as it has been.",
          "url": "https://www.fizzy.do",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/ccaa6d1d09b3/"
        },
        {
          "id": "cee7e3a29089",
          "title": "Dotprompt: Executable GenAI Prompt Templates",
          "url": "https://google.github.io/dotprompt/",
          "record": "https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/cee7e3a29089/"
        }
      ]
    },
    "mentions": [],
    "mentioned_by": [],
    "saved_twice": []
  },
  "elsewhere": {
    "wayback": "https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/"
  }
}