# Seeing like a software company - Host: [seangoedecke.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/seangoedecke.com/) - Saved: December 1, 2025 (2025-12-01T23:04:33Z) - Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/5f096b9b71ce/ - JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/5f096b9b71ce.json ## What Jamie wrote 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. I 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. > 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. Interesting stuff. ## Facts - Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/) ## Appears in - [WT335: Weekly Thing 335 / Complexity, Fizzy, Soul](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/335/), Notable ## Same host - [I'm addicted to being useful](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/3470bf756b1f/) (seangoedecke.com, January 26, 2026) ## Saved the same week - [Tiger Style](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/6bfe04e0bd79/) (tigerstyle.dev, December 1, 2025) - [Brief thoughts on the recent Cloudflare outage – Surfing Complexity](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/c64bc55e1cbf/) (surfingcomplexity.blog, December 1, 2025) - [Effective harnesses for long-running agents Anthropic](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/c91153d296ea/) (anthropic.com, December 1, 2025) - [Fizzy – Kanban as it should be. Not as it has been.](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/ccaa6d1d09b3/) (fizzy.do, December 1, 2025) - [Dotprompt: Executable GenAI Prompt Templates](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/cee7e3a29089/) (google.github.io, December 1, 2025) ## Elsewhere - Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.seangoedecke.com/seeing-like-a-software-company/