advice candidate goes to: this-edition E explorer
Every product needs an explorer version, with paid conversions to a villager product and a town planner one
Products need an explorer version in which users talk to the product with a model, reshape it, move things around and keep their own version, the product treated as primitives. When a user has something they want to keep they submit it, which is the brief, and pay to convert it into a villager product maintained across releases and, if it matters enough, a town planner product built properly or kept as a maintained fork. Each step is a revenue stream and each submission tells the vendor exactly what its users want; the same path should exist inside companies, between a department and its engineers, and around open-source projects, between users and maintainers.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. A proposal: the article knows of no vendor selling it. Could also sit in price-it-then-give-it-away as a pricing model; placed in the handover chapter because it is the handover, sold.
Where it comes from
- Explorer coding An explorer version of every product (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Feedback loops answered outline, Concepts
- Karma Points unanswered outline, Concepts
Where it goes
Chapter Explorer coding, not vibe coding, and the handover, part The frame (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Explorer coding: what people call vibe coding, done as exploring, The deployment gap is a handover, and the prototype is the best brief, Design, the design canon and Christopher Alexander: the villager's and town planner's craft, Gen ZX are developers: coding with agents the explorer coding way, which is what vibe coding should be called, A villager move: no new features while you move, or nobody can tell which change broke what, 'Nobody knows how it is built' is fixable: make the agents leave a record, a mandate, a memory and a graph, The bonus test: if nobody will put their name or their bonus on it in production, it is not ready to be in line, An explorer-coded app is a brief, not a product: not ready to be in line, and the further towards commodity the fewer agents in line.
Node idea:an-explorer-version-of-every-product in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.