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Ambition is about the scope and scale of what is being tried. Maximally accelerated asks whether the team is moving as fast as possible. Mainlining means using the product all day, every day to get real work done, bringing all your taste to bear on whether it works and whether people want it, which tightens the feedback loop.
The Codex app team ran on exactly this. They stayed user-focused, kept a tight iteration loop, and mainlined the app. Everyone building it is a developer using it for development, fixing their own problems along with the problems of colleagues and users. When people outside started noticing, the way of working stayed the same, and the attention was partly the market catching up.
Where did the term dogfooding come from?
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft manager, wrote an email in 1988 titled Eating our own Dogfood, urging colleagues to use the company's own pre-release software. The phrase spread through the software industry and now describes any team that uses its own product every day. The habit tightens feedback because the people who build the product are the first to feel what is broken. Maritz later became CEO of VMware.
Why do users invent so many products?
MIT professor Eric von Hippel studied scientific instruments in the 1970s and found that users, not manufacturers, developed most of the major innovations. Users feel a problem every day and have reason to fix it, while manufacturers have to guess. He later named this lead-user innovation and found it in fields from sports gear to medical devices. His 1988 book The Sources of Innovation laid out the findings.
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