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Unlimited time builds a blob
Limits as a filter
The first version of Basecamp took 380 hours, because its developer, a contractor in Copenhagen hired at $15 an hour and paid in Apple gear, had 10 hours per week to build it. At that pace, wasting time on nonessentials was too expensive.
AI and bloat
With AI agents, 380 hours can now produce a monstrosity that does a million things for a million people, so bloat comes naturally. Basecamp 5 is the first version built with AI acceleration, and designers were suddenly able to carry features all the way to completion. Near shipping, the team reviewed them and decided some of the features were expanding the balloon toward the point where it pops.
Protecting ease of use
What is at risk is Basecamp's central selling point, which is that it is easy to use. Anyone who builds software calls it easy to use, and a claim from the builder is not credible. A claim from the customer is. In customer surveys, being simpler than the competition is the number one reason people keep choosing Basecamp.
Why do constraints improve creative work?
Composer Igor Stravinsky argued in his Harvard lectures, published as Poetics of Music, that the more constraints a creator imposes, the more freedom is gained. A fixed form such as the fourteen-line sonnet has produced work for centuries. Limits remove most of the options and force the maker to choose among the few that remain. Haiku, with its seventeen syllables in the traditional form, works the same way.
How does feature creep take hold?
Each feature is usually requested by a real person and looks reasonable on its own. Every added feature also has to work with all the others, so the number of interactions grows faster than the number of features. Software engineers have called this pattern creeping featurism since at least the 1980s. A product with 20 features has 190 possible pairs of features that can affect each other.
Why do AI coding tools make bloat easier?
Writing code used to be slow and expensive, and that cost acted as a filter on what got built. Tools that generate code cheaply remove most of that filter. The cost of maintaining a feature stays, because every feature still needs testing, documentation, and customer support. Code that exists must be read, updated, and kept secure for as long as the product is sold.
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